Sermons are posted by request. Each of the sermons on this website was impactful enough for someone to request it in writing.
Sermons
"'G-D' is not a Boy's Name"SUnday, April 19th, 215Last week as we heard the first chapter of Genesis that said, in the NRSV translation, “male and female- he created them,” it was jarring to me to hear the masculine reference to God in this text as the original Hebrew word used here for God is plural, an expression of the ancient concept of the godhead being a male / female pair, or an entity with both male and female attributes. It says, “male and female- we created them in our image.” “The Hebrew word used for "God" in Genesis is Elohim, the plural of Eloah, a feminine title for God.[1]
In the Book of Judges this feminine aspect of God is more pronounced. Every time the “Spirit of Yahweh” appears in the book of Judges feminine noun declinations and pronouns are used.[2] From the very beginning our Judeo-Christian ancestors imagined God as both male and female. Likewise in the Gospel of John, in the original Greek, Jesus is not gendered until he is born. The “word” that exists with God before all things came into being used a gender neutral pronoun. This is particularly significant because early Greek philosophers, reconciling Greek thought with Jewish texts, equated wisdom, Hokmot in Hebrew and Sophia in Greek, which was a feminine aspect of God, with “Logos,” or “the word.”[3] The concept of God as exclusively male is a much later development in Judeo-Christian theology, not solidifying until somewhere between 300 and 500 CE.
As late as the second century the trinity was explicated as Father, Mother, and Son. In the Gospel of the Hebrews, which did not make it into the Canon when it was closed by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “Mother.” [4] Likewise, the Gospel of Thomas refers to God, among other titles, as “Compassionate Mother” and “Hidden Mother.”[5] The Syriac church continued to use Mother for the Holy Spirit well into the 5th century. [6]
With the transition of Hokmot, wisdom, which was an ancient Hebrew understanding of the divine feminine, into the word, neuter as a concept, but male upon birth, the Holy Spirit is, perhaps, the longest standing vestige of the Divine Feminine in Christian tradition. The Hebrew word for Spirit is breath, or Ruach. This is the word for God that moves on the waters in Genesis. Ruach and the Hebrew word Shekihna, which means the presence of God, are both feminine words, further evidence of an early Hebrew understanding of feminine aspects of God. This understanding of the Spirit of God as feminine comes back in the story of Jesus’ baptism when the dove rests upon him.
In ancient near east cultures the dove was a symbol of the divine feminine. [7] We also see it in the Greek word for breath, pneuma, which Jesus breathes onto the disciples and which enters them on Pentecost. Additionally, there are times in the bible when God is referred to in explicitly feminine terms. “The rock that begot you,” that we read from Deuteronomy is an example. [8]
If we take a wider look at how Christianity has engaged with feminine aspects of divinity, we can look at Catholic Saints, especially Mary. In Catholic practice Mary is worshipped almost as a deity in her own right. While still a mono-theistic, trinitarian tradition, Catholic practice holds Mary above all other women and offers prayers and supplications to her. In as much as Jesus is King, Catholic tradition calls Mary Queen, exalted in heaven to a position equal to Jesus.[9]
All of this serves to validate those of us who find a connection to the Divine in feminine symbols and language. While goddess worship is coming back into vogue in neo-pagan and wiccan circles, we need not look outside of our own tradition to find God’s femininity. In our tradition the feminine aspect of God was involved in the creation of humanity, we are made, male and female, in God’s image. The feminine aspect of God is the spirit that is available to us through word and wisdom and breath, it is the Spirit of God that is available to us in this moment.
In the Gospel of John, the place where feminine spirit transitions into masculine word, the work of God is to send, the work of Jesus, the masculinized feminine, is to create. Not one thing came into being without this feminine wisdom of God. When Jesus departs at the end of the Gospel of John, he sends us the paraklete, the Holy Spirit. They work of the Holy Spirit is to come along side us, to be our comforter and to perform the same roles designated to Eve in Genesis.[10] Our Judeo-Christian scriptures begin and end with the divine feminine.
Why, then, did she all but disappear from Christian practice? The answer goes back to the Nicene Council in 325. Emperor Constantine called together an ecumenical leadership panel to help define Christianity. There were theological disagreements between factions, which, as we know from history, could become violent. Constantine wanted both to quell the disagreements and to solidify his power. So the council that weeded out common Christian books that referred most blatantly to God in feminine terms was called, at least in part, to substantiate male power in a patriarchal society. I assume that this is no accident.
We can also find some of the answer in the bible itself, in the writings attributed to Paul, especially 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36.
“(As in all the churches of the saints, 34 women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.[d] 36 Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?)”
This type of text, one that refutes what was happening, gives us a window into what the early church was like. Women were afforded a more equal status than in the culture at large. The author of the epistle argues against women speaking in order to appease the secular authorities who find fault with it, not because it is against God. The fact that women were speaking in church was a problem only in that it called attention to the differences between the social norms of the Greco-roman culture and the new social norms of the early church.
I submit that this same patriarchal white washing happens at the council of Nicaea, that some books are taken out of the canon, because they were not valid expressions of the Christian divine, but because they were offensive to the secular authority who called the council into being and who was known to banish those who threatened his power.[11]
While all this may be intellectually interesting, it can also make a difference to us. I happen to like the metaphor of Father for God. I had a great relationship with my father and he is the type of person I think God would be as an earthly father. Imagining the type of unconditional love my father expressed to me in his lifetime as a metaphor for how God sees all of us, is not just fruitful, but life giving to me. Not so for those who have had a hard time with their earthly fathers. Having masculine names and pronouns for God in exclusive use can alienate those who have been hurt by men in their lives. It can also serve to cement the patriarchal power structure of western culture, a power structure that still exists today.
By re-embracing the Divine feminine in our own tradition we can over turn the patriarchal hegemony that silenced women in Corinth and wrote the divine feminine out of the canon. We can help women find the little piece of God that is in us, both in our soul and in our body.
In a Dream Interpretation class in seminary, someone shared a dream that seemed to be tied to her menstrual cycle. The teacher, a very wise man in many ways, cautioned about universalizing the unique experiences of women. In other words, even though he taught that dreams come to us in the interest of our own health and wholeness as well as the health and wholeness of the world, images specific to women’s bodies could not be interpreted to be about the health and wholeness of the whole world, but only women. I disagreed with him. I pointed out that for long periods of history men’s unique experiences were universalized in a way that made women invisible. There is power in reasserting that which has been silenced.
This is the power we reclaim when we use the divine feminine, especially when we use it from the context of our own history. The God of Moses, who asked to be called “I am, I was, I will always be,” was not a man. God is not boy’s name. The Judeo-Christian God is a dynamic presence, a spirit of comfort, a generative force, the collected wisdom of the universe, and has been understood as both Male and Female since the beginning of our tradition. Praise be to God.
[1] http://www.northernway.org/goddess.html 4-13-15
[2] http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume3/spirit.htm 4-16-15
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(wisdom)#New_Testament 4-16-15
[4] https://godde.wordpress.com/godde-the-divine-feminine/the-divine-feminine-trinity/ 4-13-15
[5] http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume3/spirit.htm 4-16-15
[6] https://godde.wordpress.com/godde-the-divine-feminine/the-divine-feminine-trinity/ 4-13-15
[7] https://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/FEMGODES.TXT 4-13-15
[8] https://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/FEMGODES.TXT 4-13-15
[9] https://www.catholiccompany.com/content/What-the-Catholic-Church-Teaches-About-Mary.cfm 4-16-15
[10] The Hidden Power of a Woman, Chavda and Chavda Pg. 22-23
[11] The Biblical Canon: It’s Origin, Transmission, and Authority, Lee Martin McDonald, Pg. 316
"Charged"
Sunday, February 15th, 2015My Christian Education professor, Russell Haitch, taught us to focus on the transformative moment, those small moments of time when God breaks into our lives in such a way that we are open to being transformed. I have come to think of these moments as times when we are charged, filled up with the electricity that makes our bodies run and connects our soul to the vital energy of all that is, that cosmic force we refer to as God. I have had many such moments in my life.
As I prepared for this week’s worship service, for integrating the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter, that some of our kids are studying this morning, with the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain top, I kept focusing on transformative moments. The moment Jesus transforms Jairus’ daughter from the beloved daughter who is either asleep or dead into a child who is full of life, the moment the woman who was hemorrhaging was healed- this is the healing that happens when Jesus is on the way to Jairus’ daughter, and, more importantly, the moment Jesus pauses his whole day to acknowledge her, the moment of transfiguration on the mountain, when Jesus was filled so much with spirit that his clothes glowed, it is the moment he is anointed an equal to Moses and Elijiah, there is the moment that Peter, James, and John experience Jesus filled with God’s spirit, the moment they dedicate themselves to commemorating their experience of God, and the following moment when Jesus tells them to keep it in their hearts instead, not to build an institution from their experience.
These two stories are filled with moments of transformation.
I had planned for this to be enough for this sermon- to explicate this one thing- how such moments can charge us, fill us, make us a channel for God’s spirit in the world. We did it with our hands. The kids showed us the energy that flows through us. I had good examples. And then I had a moment. It was, not surprisingly, on Facebook.
There was a teasing title- as there always is- “It’s Trans Sunday.” Of course I clicked on it. After all I was focusing on transformative moments. I figured the article would be exactly that. I thought it might contain a good example for me to weave into my sermon.
So I read it and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
As I tried to complete my sermon, everything I wrote paled in comparison to the insights in this article. It made me think of something I discovered in my Greek class in seminary. I was translating the beginning of the first chapter of the Gospel of John and realized that the pronouns used to describe Jesus, the word and the light, were gender neutral until he was born.
In Spirit he had no gender.
I told everyone who would listen. I was so excited about this seemingly small fact. And as I read this article this week, everything in it seemed tied to this one small fact that the bible geek in me finds so interesting. In describing what Jesus must have looked like when he was transformed Stephen J. Patterson looks to others in the bible described as being in God’s image.
He points out that when Adam was created, Genesis says he was created “male and female” in God’s image. I have always read this as a detail that pointed to the equality of men and women, created at the same time by the divine, who in Genesis is named in plural “We created them.” Patterson points to it as a parallel to my discovery in the Gospel of John- spirit is not gendered, or is all gendered.[1]
He goes on to point out other scriptures that seem to explicate the gender neutrality of spirit.
“In the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus tells the Sadducees that in the resurrection people will no longer marry nor be given in marriage, for they will become like the angels—that is, without gender (Mark 12: 24-27). In 1 Corinthians (11:2-16) we find Paul talking over a practice in Corinth that is best described as liturgical gender-bending, where men and women pray and prophesy with hair long and flowing, so that no one can tell who is male and who is female. And in Matthew (19:10-12) we learn that there were followers of Jesus who embraced the ideal of genderless life so fully that they chose to become “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.”
All of this reflection on gender has roots that run deep into the very origins of Christianity. The oldest Christian baptismal creed includes it. That creed, embedded in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, went like this: “You are all children (literally: sons) of God in Christ…. There is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female….” (Galatians 3:26-28). Baptism erased the significance of race, class, and gender. This is what it originally meant to be transformed by baptism into a child of God. No longer “male and female” referred directly to Genesis 1:27 and implied that the newly baptized had returned to that primordial perfection in which male and female reside in a single whole.”
So what’s so significant about this reading of gender?
It have known or known of transgendered folk all of my life. The first was my mom’s cousin, Randy. The story was that Randy dropped a lot of acid in the 60’s. His father found pictures painted in his own blood hidden in his room. When he was being kicked out of the house he told his father that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Over the years he would surface every once in a while. Once he broke into his father’s house and broke all the dishes. Another time he set the pictures on the refrigerator on fire. As a child I was told that if I ever saw Randy on the street, I should run to the nearest house and knock until someone answered and then call the police.
The second was a customer at my dad’s store. I never actually met her, but my dad would tell us about her. She presented to the world as a woman, but not gracefully. She did not pass well. Her ID was with her old name and gender and she would always claim that she was using her husband’s check book, a white lie my father accepted without comment. But at home, my father used her as a joke. He held no malice towards her, but he used her incongruous masculine features and feminine wardrobe as a source of humor.
By college I was hanging out with the local Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and going to school at San Francisco State University with many gender-bending classmates, people who transformed my understanding of transgender from one that included the mentally ill who were to be feared and the source of punch lines, to one that included the full diversity of humanity. In studying different cultures and histories, I came across the Native gender category of Two Spirit people, those who contain both male and female attributes. This was an enlightening discovery because by this time I understood that the life of a transgendered person in our culture is not easy.
In the story my family tells about my cousin, feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body
was caused by LSD. Research statistics would tell a different story. Those who are born with gender dysphoria are more likely to engage in self-harming behaviors, like drug use and suicide. I imagine someone struggling with gender dysphoria would have a hard time thinking of themselves as made in God’s image. Reclaiming the image of the divine as all-gendered, something outside the binary assumptions of our two gendered understanding of the world, would indeed be transformative.
And not just for those who identify as transgendered. As a child I was a tomboy. I was actually fiercely independent and stubborn. I loved my hot wheels and my green machine and would play in the dirt and build things. I had an uncle who called me “Mikey” because he said I didn’t act like a girl. In college I wore men’s dress shirts and sports jackets on a regular basis. I got them free from my grandfather’s closet. When I took my psych exams for ministry I came out as masculine, a designation I argued, saying that assertiveness should not be defined as masculine, as passiveness was not essentially feminine. This argument, it seems, was further evidence of my masculinity, according to the woman conducting the testing. There is a wonderful commercial circulating right now about throwing like a girl, a phrase that makes my kid angry. It is reclaiming the power of girls. So does the idea that the divine in whose image we are made is all-gendered. Those of us who have not neatly fit into a socially defined gender box can find ourselves in God and God in us.
There was another facebook story that grabbed my attention this week- a story posted by parents explaining to the world how their younger child, who was declared a girl at birth, was transitioning to presenting as a boy. The story was a loving explanation of what gender dysphoria is, how it is diagnosed, and the support this family has in helping their child thrive in this world as the beautiful boy he is. How much more powerful if we see this child also
as the image of God.
Our country is experiencing an interesting transformation right now. We are beginning to understand gender dysphoria as a naturally occurring gender variation. And people are speaking up for ways we can be welcoming to those who are born this way. Patterson’s reading of the transfiguration can take us one step further to seeing transgendered folk as closer to an accurate image of the divine.
I leave you with one more thing. There is a Hindu word, Namaste, which means “The little piece of God that is in me bows to the little peace of God that is in you.” Inherent in this word is the acknowledgment that the spark of the divine charges each of us- runs through us like a current. Let us look each other in the eye and see beyond our cultural norms- beyond the cues we use to read male or female and see the holistic piece of the divine that is in each of us- the ways that each of us have aspects of male and female. May it be so. Namaste.
[1] http://www.stephenjpatterson.org/posts/2015/2/13/its-trans-sunday
In the Book of Judges this feminine aspect of God is more pronounced. Every time the “Spirit of Yahweh” appears in the book of Judges feminine noun declinations and pronouns are used.[2] From the very beginning our Judeo-Christian ancestors imagined God as both male and female. Likewise in the Gospel of John, in the original Greek, Jesus is not gendered until he is born. The “word” that exists with God before all things came into being used a gender neutral pronoun. This is particularly significant because early Greek philosophers, reconciling Greek thought with Jewish texts, equated wisdom, Hokmot in Hebrew and Sophia in Greek, which was a feminine aspect of God, with “Logos,” or “the word.”[3] The concept of God as exclusively male is a much later development in Judeo-Christian theology, not solidifying until somewhere between 300 and 500 CE.
As late as the second century the trinity was explicated as Father, Mother, and Son. In the Gospel of the Hebrews, which did not make it into the Canon when it was closed by the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “Mother.” [4] Likewise, the Gospel of Thomas refers to God, among other titles, as “Compassionate Mother” and “Hidden Mother.”[5] The Syriac church continued to use Mother for the Holy Spirit well into the 5th century. [6]
With the transition of Hokmot, wisdom, which was an ancient Hebrew understanding of the divine feminine, into the word, neuter as a concept, but male upon birth, the Holy Spirit is, perhaps, the longest standing vestige of the Divine Feminine in Christian tradition. The Hebrew word for Spirit is breath, or Ruach. This is the word for God that moves on the waters in Genesis. Ruach and the Hebrew word Shekihna, which means the presence of God, are both feminine words, further evidence of an early Hebrew understanding of feminine aspects of God. This understanding of the Spirit of God as feminine comes back in the story of Jesus’ baptism when the dove rests upon him.
In ancient near east cultures the dove was a symbol of the divine feminine. [7] We also see it in the Greek word for breath, pneuma, which Jesus breathes onto the disciples and which enters them on Pentecost. Additionally, there are times in the bible when God is referred to in explicitly feminine terms. “The rock that begot you,” that we read from Deuteronomy is an example. [8]
If we take a wider look at how Christianity has engaged with feminine aspects of divinity, we can look at Catholic Saints, especially Mary. In Catholic practice Mary is worshipped almost as a deity in her own right. While still a mono-theistic, trinitarian tradition, Catholic practice holds Mary above all other women and offers prayers and supplications to her. In as much as Jesus is King, Catholic tradition calls Mary Queen, exalted in heaven to a position equal to Jesus.[9]
All of this serves to validate those of us who find a connection to the Divine in feminine symbols and language. While goddess worship is coming back into vogue in neo-pagan and wiccan circles, we need not look outside of our own tradition to find God’s femininity. In our tradition the feminine aspect of God was involved in the creation of humanity, we are made, male and female, in God’s image. The feminine aspect of God is the spirit that is available to us through word and wisdom and breath, it is the Spirit of God that is available to us in this moment.
In the Gospel of John, the place where feminine spirit transitions into masculine word, the work of God is to send, the work of Jesus, the masculinized feminine, is to create. Not one thing came into being without this feminine wisdom of God. When Jesus departs at the end of the Gospel of John, he sends us the paraklete, the Holy Spirit. They work of the Holy Spirit is to come along side us, to be our comforter and to perform the same roles designated to Eve in Genesis.[10] Our Judeo-Christian scriptures begin and end with the divine feminine.
Why, then, did she all but disappear from Christian practice? The answer goes back to the Nicene Council in 325. Emperor Constantine called together an ecumenical leadership panel to help define Christianity. There were theological disagreements between factions, which, as we know from history, could become violent. Constantine wanted both to quell the disagreements and to solidify his power. So the council that weeded out common Christian books that referred most blatantly to God in feminine terms was called, at least in part, to substantiate male power in a patriarchal society. I assume that this is no accident.
We can also find some of the answer in the bible itself, in the writings attributed to Paul, especially 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36.
“(As in all the churches of the saints, 34 women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.[d] 36 Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?)”
This type of text, one that refutes what was happening, gives us a window into what the early church was like. Women were afforded a more equal status than in the culture at large. The author of the epistle argues against women speaking in order to appease the secular authorities who find fault with it, not because it is against God. The fact that women were speaking in church was a problem only in that it called attention to the differences between the social norms of the Greco-roman culture and the new social norms of the early church.
I submit that this same patriarchal white washing happens at the council of Nicaea, that some books are taken out of the canon, because they were not valid expressions of the Christian divine, but because they were offensive to the secular authority who called the council into being and who was known to banish those who threatened his power.[11]
While all this may be intellectually interesting, it can also make a difference to us. I happen to like the metaphor of Father for God. I had a great relationship with my father and he is the type of person I think God would be as an earthly father. Imagining the type of unconditional love my father expressed to me in his lifetime as a metaphor for how God sees all of us, is not just fruitful, but life giving to me. Not so for those who have had a hard time with their earthly fathers. Having masculine names and pronouns for God in exclusive use can alienate those who have been hurt by men in their lives. It can also serve to cement the patriarchal power structure of western culture, a power structure that still exists today.
By re-embracing the Divine feminine in our own tradition we can over turn the patriarchal hegemony that silenced women in Corinth and wrote the divine feminine out of the canon. We can help women find the little piece of God that is in us, both in our soul and in our body.
In a Dream Interpretation class in seminary, someone shared a dream that seemed to be tied to her menstrual cycle. The teacher, a very wise man in many ways, cautioned about universalizing the unique experiences of women. In other words, even though he taught that dreams come to us in the interest of our own health and wholeness as well as the health and wholeness of the world, images specific to women’s bodies could not be interpreted to be about the health and wholeness of the whole world, but only women. I disagreed with him. I pointed out that for long periods of history men’s unique experiences were universalized in a way that made women invisible. There is power in reasserting that which has been silenced.
This is the power we reclaim when we use the divine feminine, especially when we use it from the context of our own history. The God of Moses, who asked to be called “I am, I was, I will always be,” was not a man. God is not boy’s name. The Judeo-Christian God is a dynamic presence, a spirit of comfort, a generative force, the collected wisdom of the universe, and has been understood as both Male and Female since the beginning of our tradition. Praise be to God.
[1] http://www.northernway.org/goddess.html 4-13-15
[2] http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume3/spirit.htm 4-16-15
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(wisdom)#New_Testament 4-16-15
[4] https://godde.wordpress.com/godde-the-divine-feminine/the-divine-feminine-trinity/ 4-13-15
[5] http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume3/spirit.htm 4-16-15
[6] https://godde.wordpress.com/godde-the-divine-feminine/the-divine-feminine-trinity/ 4-13-15
[7] https://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/FEMGODES.TXT 4-13-15
[8] https://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/FEMGODES.TXT 4-13-15
[9] https://www.catholiccompany.com/content/What-the-Catholic-Church-Teaches-About-Mary.cfm 4-16-15
[10] The Hidden Power of a Woman, Chavda and Chavda Pg. 22-23
[11] The Biblical Canon: It’s Origin, Transmission, and Authority, Lee Martin McDonald, Pg. 316
"Charged"
Sunday, February 15th, 2015My Christian Education professor, Russell Haitch, taught us to focus on the transformative moment, those small moments of time when God breaks into our lives in such a way that we are open to being transformed. I have come to think of these moments as times when we are charged, filled up with the electricity that makes our bodies run and connects our soul to the vital energy of all that is, that cosmic force we refer to as God. I have had many such moments in my life.
As I prepared for this week’s worship service, for integrating the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter, that some of our kids are studying this morning, with the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain top, I kept focusing on transformative moments. The moment Jesus transforms Jairus’ daughter from the beloved daughter who is either asleep or dead into a child who is full of life, the moment the woman who was hemorrhaging was healed- this is the healing that happens when Jesus is on the way to Jairus’ daughter, and, more importantly, the moment Jesus pauses his whole day to acknowledge her, the moment of transfiguration on the mountain, when Jesus was filled so much with spirit that his clothes glowed, it is the moment he is anointed an equal to Moses and Elijiah, there is the moment that Peter, James, and John experience Jesus filled with God’s spirit, the moment they dedicate themselves to commemorating their experience of God, and the following moment when Jesus tells them to keep it in their hearts instead, not to build an institution from their experience.
These two stories are filled with moments of transformation.
I had planned for this to be enough for this sermon- to explicate this one thing- how such moments can charge us, fill us, make us a channel for God’s spirit in the world. We did it with our hands. The kids showed us the energy that flows through us. I had good examples. And then I had a moment. It was, not surprisingly, on Facebook.
There was a teasing title- as there always is- “It’s Trans Sunday.” Of course I clicked on it. After all I was focusing on transformative moments. I figured the article would be exactly that. I thought it might contain a good example for me to weave into my sermon.
So I read it and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
As I tried to complete my sermon, everything I wrote paled in comparison to the insights in this article. It made me think of something I discovered in my Greek class in seminary. I was translating the beginning of the first chapter of the Gospel of John and realized that the pronouns used to describe Jesus, the word and the light, were gender neutral until he was born.
In Spirit he had no gender.
I told everyone who would listen. I was so excited about this seemingly small fact. And as I read this article this week, everything in it seemed tied to this one small fact that the bible geek in me finds so interesting. In describing what Jesus must have looked like when he was transformed Stephen J. Patterson looks to others in the bible described as being in God’s image.
He points out that when Adam was created, Genesis says he was created “male and female” in God’s image. I have always read this as a detail that pointed to the equality of men and women, created at the same time by the divine, who in Genesis is named in plural “We created them.” Patterson points to it as a parallel to my discovery in the Gospel of John- spirit is not gendered, or is all gendered.[1]
He goes on to point out other scriptures that seem to explicate the gender neutrality of spirit.
“In the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus tells the Sadducees that in the resurrection people will no longer marry nor be given in marriage, for they will become like the angels—that is, without gender (Mark 12: 24-27). In 1 Corinthians (11:2-16) we find Paul talking over a practice in Corinth that is best described as liturgical gender-bending, where men and women pray and prophesy with hair long and flowing, so that no one can tell who is male and who is female. And in Matthew (19:10-12) we learn that there were followers of Jesus who embraced the ideal of genderless life so fully that they chose to become “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.”
All of this reflection on gender has roots that run deep into the very origins of Christianity. The oldest Christian baptismal creed includes it. That creed, embedded in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, went like this: “You are all children (literally: sons) of God in Christ…. There is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female….” (Galatians 3:26-28). Baptism erased the significance of race, class, and gender. This is what it originally meant to be transformed by baptism into a child of God. No longer “male and female” referred directly to Genesis 1:27 and implied that the newly baptized had returned to that primordial perfection in which male and female reside in a single whole.”
So what’s so significant about this reading of gender?
It have known or known of transgendered folk all of my life. The first was my mom’s cousin, Randy. The story was that Randy dropped a lot of acid in the 60’s. His father found pictures painted in his own blood hidden in his room. When he was being kicked out of the house he told his father that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. Over the years he would surface every once in a while. Once he broke into his father’s house and broke all the dishes. Another time he set the pictures on the refrigerator on fire. As a child I was told that if I ever saw Randy on the street, I should run to the nearest house and knock until someone answered and then call the police.
The second was a customer at my dad’s store. I never actually met her, but my dad would tell us about her. She presented to the world as a woman, but not gracefully. She did not pass well. Her ID was with her old name and gender and she would always claim that she was using her husband’s check book, a white lie my father accepted without comment. But at home, my father used her as a joke. He held no malice towards her, but he used her incongruous masculine features and feminine wardrobe as a source of humor.
By college I was hanging out with the local Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and going to school at San Francisco State University with many gender-bending classmates, people who transformed my understanding of transgender from one that included the mentally ill who were to be feared and the source of punch lines, to one that included the full diversity of humanity. In studying different cultures and histories, I came across the Native gender category of Two Spirit people, those who contain both male and female attributes. This was an enlightening discovery because by this time I understood that the life of a transgendered person in our culture is not easy.
In the story my family tells about my cousin, feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body
was caused by LSD. Research statistics would tell a different story. Those who are born with gender dysphoria are more likely to engage in self-harming behaviors, like drug use and suicide. I imagine someone struggling with gender dysphoria would have a hard time thinking of themselves as made in God’s image. Reclaiming the image of the divine as all-gendered, something outside the binary assumptions of our two gendered understanding of the world, would indeed be transformative.
And not just for those who identify as transgendered. As a child I was a tomboy. I was actually fiercely independent and stubborn. I loved my hot wheels and my green machine and would play in the dirt and build things. I had an uncle who called me “Mikey” because he said I didn’t act like a girl. In college I wore men’s dress shirts and sports jackets on a regular basis. I got them free from my grandfather’s closet. When I took my psych exams for ministry I came out as masculine, a designation I argued, saying that assertiveness should not be defined as masculine, as passiveness was not essentially feminine. This argument, it seems, was further evidence of my masculinity, according to the woman conducting the testing. There is a wonderful commercial circulating right now about throwing like a girl, a phrase that makes my kid angry. It is reclaiming the power of girls. So does the idea that the divine in whose image we are made is all-gendered. Those of us who have not neatly fit into a socially defined gender box can find ourselves in God and God in us.
There was another facebook story that grabbed my attention this week- a story posted by parents explaining to the world how their younger child, who was declared a girl at birth, was transitioning to presenting as a boy. The story was a loving explanation of what gender dysphoria is, how it is diagnosed, and the support this family has in helping their child thrive in this world as the beautiful boy he is. How much more powerful if we see this child also
as the image of God.
Our country is experiencing an interesting transformation right now. We are beginning to understand gender dysphoria as a naturally occurring gender variation. And people are speaking up for ways we can be welcoming to those who are born this way. Patterson’s reading of the transfiguration can take us one step further to seeing transgendered folk as closer to an accurate image of the divine.
I leave you with one more thing. There is a Hindu word, Namaste, which means “The little piece of God that is in me bows to the little peace of God that is in you.” Inherent in this word is the acknowledgment that the spark of the divine charges each of us- runs through us like a current. Let us look each other in the eye and see beyond our cultural norms- beyond the cues we use to read male or female and see the holistic piece of the divine that is in each of us- the ways that each of us have aspects of male and female. May it be so. Namaste.
[1] http://www.stephenjpatterson.org/posts/2015/2/13/its-trans-sunday
December 2014
Sunday, December 7th
Isaiah 40:3-5
As with many of you, December is a pretty busy time of year for me. Add to that the things going on in our country, and in the world right now, and I am a bit all over the place this week. When I sat down yesterday to edit my sermon, I found that my sermon was a bit all over the place, but I think they are all places we need to go.
I have long subscribed to the magazine “Parenting.” One time they published an article about a mom’s response to her daughter who was afraid of the dark. When her daughter would wake up in the middle of the night, scared of some shadow or some sound in the dark, the mom would grab flashlights and they would go explore what it was. One time there were lots of noises outside. The mom took her daughter outside to explore the dark world. They investigated everything her daughter found scary in the dark. They found bugs and leaves and all sorts of things that transformed into ordinary items once they shined a light on it.
On a Mission trip to an animal sanctuary, I worked with a group of youth to muck a barn. It’s the one I mentioned last week- that hadn’t been mucked for six months. It took us the better part of a day to get it done. As we removed the smelly hay, we put it into a truck which dumped it off on another part of the farm. They were using it to condition soil. There was a group of about four of us spreading out this hay. At one point I lost site of one of the youth. I found him in the bathroom, trying to bath in the sink. I asked him what was going on and he said, “I have manure in my shirt.” I said, “So do I.” He says, “No, you don’t understand. I have manure in my shirt.” I said, “So do I. But tell me what that is like for you.” He said, “It’s like thousands of tiny shards of glass cutting into me.”
Well, that did not sound pleasant. I could see that there were no actual cuts. The thought of animal feces rubbing against his skin instigated a whirl of dark thoughts. While I was able to shake off the disgust of having manure in my shirt, his brain just kept repeating the disgust over and over until he was consumed with the need to wash off the manure at any cost.
By asking, “What is that like for you?” I interrupted his thoughts. Slowed down his brain. He articulated what was going on inside his mind, bringing the dark into the light. We were able to talk through the situation, coming up with an agreeable solution for him, borrow a shirt from someone else. Amazingly, by the time I arrived back with a clean shirt, he had discovered that he could be ok wearing the manure-laden shirt until we finished working for the day.
Sometimes all we need to do to overcome our fear- to welcome the unknown into our lives- is to notice it. To shine a light on it and see that it is ok. Welcoming the unknown, whether noises in the dark, or manure in our shirt, or new people to our community is about getting to know it well enough to see it for what it is, not what we fear it might be, not for our initial reaction to it.
Isaiah calls us today to make straight the way. I used this as a mantra when I was discerning my call to Ministry. It took me six months from when I was ready for a call until I had one, a time that felt way too long to me. I used to describe it as being called there by God and when you get there, there’s no there there. During this time I used “make straight the way” as a meditation mantra and the image that would come up for me over and over was of being on a roller coaster. I would be holding on to the security bar and as I was tossed up and down and upside down, I’d be chanting, “make straight the way, make straight the way.” The way is never straight.
I once spent hours hanging banners for the National Coming Out day celebration. I couldn’t get them straight. Complaining to a friend, he said, “they’re not meant to be straight.” We put meanings on these words, based on our life experiences. When Isaiah says, make straight the way, he means help clear a path for people to find God. It’s not actually about laying a straight path, but finding a possible way through the wild twist and turns of the world to connect with God.
Isaiah says we are to make the way in the wilderness, in the wildness of our lives. Making straight the way is not about ironing flat those things that make us who we are. Some are not meant to be straight. Making straight the way is not about avoiding twists and turns and sudden drops.
Isaiah says every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain shall be made low. This is not about strip mining and landfill. It’s not literally changing the landscape, it’s about our emotional landscape. Valleys that seemed too deep to cross become crossable. Mountains that seem too high to climb become climbable, not because they change, but because we do we see possibility where before we saw obstacles.
And the difference- the spark of transformation- is that there was with God in the beginning, before all things, this word and this word came into the world, and continues to come into the world, is a light that darkness can not overcome. With light, we can assuage our fears. With light we can give voice to our irrationality and learn to live with the reality of life on earth- with mountains to climb and manure in our shirts. And that is the good news of advent- the light is coming, the light came, the light will come, no darkness has ever been able to put out the light.
I love this metaphor of darkness and light. Light is amazing. It travels at the speed of light. Have you ever tried to race a light beam? It seems to cross the room instantly. Light is everywhere at once, instantly. This is why darkness can not overcome it.
But this imagery, this metaphor of light and dark for good and evil, peace and fear, is laden with so much historical racism. It bothers me every year at advent. Dark skinned people in America have been described as less than since they were brought here in chains or found here and subjugated. Dark skinned people in India have been seen as being lower class. Dark skinned people in China have historically been undesirable.
These prejudices grew out of a desire to maintain or regain power. We held Africans in slavery and used language as both a rationality for that slavery and a means of perpetuating it. Light is good. Dark is bad. Light is of God, dark of the devil. To a certain extent we still see things that way. Everywhere we look today is the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Amen to that. Black Lives Matter.
And it’s particularly important for us here, in this room with few black faces, to believe this with conviction. Chris Rock this week was quoted as saying, “Black folk haven’t changed. White folk have changed.” White folk have seen the possibility of recognizing the inherent worth of all people. We need so much more of this. This is making straight the way.
What has been happening in and about Ferguson in and about New York is shining a light on our darkness. We have lived for so long with systematic racism that we must shine a brighter light on it to see it. But unlike the story of the little girl afraid of the dark and the youth afraid of the manure, shining a light on it is not enough. Our fear will not go away by simply looking at the situation and understanding it.
We sang this morning, “when God is like a child.” Because my child is light I can send her out in our neighborhood to visit her friends without having “the talk.” I have had talks with her about how to be safe, but we haven’t talked to her about how to behave with a police officer. I haven’t had to. But if my child were dark, especially if I had a son, I would have to. I read about a group of black mothers who sat on a panel and told people what they had told their sons about how to stay safe.
They tell their sons to keep their license and registration out in the open while they drive so they do not have to reach for anything if stopped by an officer. They tell their sons to keep their hands out of their pockets and to say, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They tell their sons not to walk down the street with more than one friend, lest they be seen as a gang or a mob. They tell their sons that they should not just be humble, but be prepared to be humiliated without responding. They talked of a 12 year old son who was stopped by the police for fitting a description. He was frisked. He was frightened. He was two blocks from home and wanted to run to his mom. He told her this, crying. She realized that she had forgotten to tell him not to run. She told him right then, never to run from the police. “They will shoot you,” she said. And then she cried.
I know this may seem far off and remote to many of us. But it could happen here. When I was interviewing I heard the story of the stabbing that happened just off our property. They had attended an event held at our church and when they were asked to leave for behaving poorly things escalated in the parking lot.
In one sense our response was beautiful. We wanted to find a way to continue to be a place of welcome. In another sense it perpetuated the types of attitudes and responses that feed into systemic racism. We actually agreed to a policy that would create different church rules for people from a particular ethnic group. These policies made sense when thinking about renting our space to the same group of people again, the ones who were loud enough to annoy our neighbors and out of control enough to stab someone. But they make no sense when thinking about the whole of an ethnic group.
I have read Pastor Mark’s conversations with the Moorhead police department and have talked about this issue with the trustees and the moderator and the deacons. I know that all parties involved came from a place of welcome. But I also see the legacy of an historically racist culture coming out in the conversations.
A woman came in last week, asking for information about having her wedding here. She happened to be a part of this particular ethnic group. She was excited about her wedding. She loved seeing the church and imagining herself standing here marrying the man she will spend her life with. And then there was this uncomfortable conversation about the time of her event and the need to hire security, because of her ethnicity. I wonder what this felt like to her.
When I was in college I was one of very few white students who studied extensively in the Black Studies Department. I had a couple of experiences there that gave me a personal, emotional peak into racism. The first was a teacher, the dean of the department, who said in his opening line to his class, “When I started teaching I didn’t want to teach no crackers.” I had to ask my friend what “cracker” meant. Later in the semester I made a comment about two books by Chiek Anta Diop, a famous historian who was the first to posit that humanity originated in Africa. The teacher told me I had misunderstood the text. Two minutes later an African American student made the same comment. The teacher told him he had the makings of a master’s thesis. I could have complained about these comments, but this man, the dean of the department, had to personally sign off on my major. I did not want to risk not being able to graduate in my chosen field.
Another semester I was taking a class called “Black Fiction.” In the first class the teacher told us how she had been an English major at the same school and how she could never get anything higher than a B. It didn’t matter how much she studied or how much she researched or how well written her work was, nothing higher than a B. She understood it to be racism. She told us she didn’t give white students anything higher than a C. I was determined to be the first. I worked very hard on my midterm and got a C. I worked even harder on my final and got a C. I took an incomplete and worked for months on a re-write, gathering as much critique and comment as I could from other sources. Still, I got a C. It was the only C I received in college. I had even Aced the “I don’t want to teach no crackers” class.
These teachers were right about one thing. These experiences taught me more about systemic racism than any research could have. I was wrong because I was white. I was unable to get an A because I was white.
Now, let’s put this in perspective. These were two out of many classes I took. I had other Black Studies courses where my skin color made no difference. In my life since I dare say my ethnicity has not been a hindrance. And these two situations were not life threatening.
When thinking about the systemic issues that led to the situation in Ferguson and the ones that led to the altercation outside our building, the stakes are higher. Our police officers are heavily armed, some with military grade assault weapons. These weapons are meant to kill. When police officers respond to any situation deadly force is an option.
This is an issue, no matter your skin color, but, just like my experience in the Black Studies classes, and the bride’s experience here last week, skin color brings different expectations. In Ferguson, as with many other young black men, the assumptions of those with whom we interact differ based on our skin color, our ethnicity.
As I see it, two things need to change in our culture. The first is the militarization of the police. Deadly force is too easy of an option. Should not our highly trained professional Peace Officers be trained first and foremost in peaceful tactics, such as how to diffuse a situation that is potentially violent? No where is this need more apparent than in the recent death of 12 year old Tamir Rice. He was in the park playing with a toy gun. Police were called. A police office arrived and killed him within seconds of exiting his vehicle. There was no attempt to resolve the situation peacefully.
The second thing that needs to change, in each of us, is seeing a person as the color of their skin. Treat each encounter and each person on their own merits. I learned something from my part in the awkward conversation with the bride last week. I should have listened more to her individual story. I should have asked more questions about her.
I should have come to the experience with a beginner’s mind, from a quiet center. And yet I came to it full of my own complex feelings about our history with her assumed community. I assume the same is true of the police officers involved with Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner…
I own my complicity in the situation in our community. We are changing our policy, taking race and ethnicity out of the equation, while still applying limits learned from the stabbing. My prayer for the bride who was here is that she has a day filled with unencumbered joy in a place that fully welcomes her family. I hope we can be that place and know that if we can not, I have learned something in the process that makes me a better person.
The way is never straight, but if you focus on just the one step in front of you, that one can be straight. You can make that one step straight. And that is what we are called to do, focus on the one step right in front of you. The one person in front of you. See them for what they are, not the assumptions you bring to it. Find the centered, light place in your soul, the place where you are most connected to God, and act out of that place as often as you can. This is making straight the way. May it be so.
Isaiah 40:3-5
As with many of you, December is a pretty busy time of year for me. Add to that the things going on in our country, and in the world right now, and I am a bit all over the place this week. When I sat down yesterday to edit my sermon, I found that my sermon was a bit all over the place, but I think they are all places we need to go.
I have long subscribed to the magazine “Parenting.” One time they published an article about a mom’s response to her daughter who was afraid of the dark. When her daughter would wake up in the middle of the night, scared of some shadow or some sound in the dark, the mom would grab flashlights and they would go explore what it was. One time there were lots of noises outside. The mom took her daughter outside to explore the dark world. They investigated everything her daughter found scary in the dark. They found bugs and leaves and all sorts of things that transformed into ordinary items once they shined a light on it.
On a Mission trip to an animal sanctuary, I worked with a group of youth to muck a barn. It’s the one I mentioned last week- that hadn’t been mucked for six months. It took us the better part of a day to get it done. As we removed the smelly hay, we put it into a truck which dumped it off on another part of the farm. They were using it to condition soil. There was a group of about four of us spreading out this hay. At one point I lost site of one of the youth. I found him in the bathroom, trying to bath in the sink. I asked him what was going on and he said, “I have manure in my shirt.” I said, “So do I.” He says, “No, you don’t understand. I have manure in my shirt.” I said, “So do I. But tell me what that is like for you.” He said, “It’s like thousands of tiny shards of glass cutting into me.”
Well, that did not sound pleasant. I could see that there were no actual cuts. The thought of animal feces rubbing against his skin instigated a whirl of dark thoughts. While I was able to shake off the disgust of having manure in my shirt, his brain just kept repeating the disgust over and over until he was consumed with the need to wash off the manure at any cost.
By asking, “What is that like for you?” I interrupted his thoughts. Slowed down his brain. He articulated what was going on inside his mind, bringing the dark into the light. We were able to talk through the situation, coming up with an agreeable solution for him, borrow a shirt from someone else. Amazingly, by the time I arrived back with a clean shirt, he had discovered that he could be ok wearing the manure-laden shirt until we finished working for the day.
Sometimes all we need to do to overcome our fear- to welcome the unknown into our lives- is to notice it. To shine a light on it and see that it is ok. Welcoming the unknown, whether noises in the dark, or manure in our shirt, or new people to our community is about getting to know it well enough to see it for what it is, not what we fear it might be, not for our initial reaction to it.
Isaiah calls us today to make straight the way. I used this as a mantra when I was discerning my call to Ministry. It took me six months from when I was ready for a call until I had one, a time that felt way too long to me. I used to describe it as being called there by God and when you get there, there’s no there there. During this time I used “make straight the way” as a meditation mantra and the image that would come up for me over and over was of being on a roller coaster. I would be holding on to the security bar and as I was tossed up and down and upside down, I’d be chanting, “make straight the way, make straight the way.” The way is never straight.
I once spent hours hanging banners for the National Coming Out day celebration. I couldn’t get them straight. Complaining to a friend, he said, “they’re not meant to be straight.” We put meanings on these words, based on our life experiences. When Isaiah says, make straight the way, he means help clear a path for people to find God. It’s not actually about laying a straight path, but finding a possible way through the wild twist and turns of the world to connect with God.
Isaiah says we are to make the way in the wilderness, in the wildness of our lives. Making straight the way is not about ironing flat those things that make us who we are. Some are not meant to be straight. Making straight the way is not about avoiding twists and turns and sudden drops.
Isaiah says every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain shall be made low. This is not about strip mining and landfill. It’s not literally changing the landscape, it’s about our emotional landscape. Valleys that seemed too deep to cross become crossable. Mountains that seem too high to climb become climbable, not because they change, but because we do we see possibility where before we saw obstacles.
And the difference- the spark of transformation- is that there was with God in the beginning, before all things, this word and this word came into the world, and continues to come into the world, is a light that darkness can not overcome. With light, we can assuage our fears. With light we can give voice to our irrationality and learn to live with the reality of life on earth- with mountains to climb and manure in our shirts. And that is the good news of advent- the light is coming, the light came, the light will come, no darkness has ever been able to put out the light.
I love this metaphor of darkness and light. Light is amazing. It travels at the speed of light. Have you ever tried to race a light beam? It seems to cross the room instantly. Light is everywhere at once, instantly. This is why darkness can not overcome it.
But this imagery, this metaphor of light and dark for good and evil, peace and fear, is laden with so much historical racism. It bothers me every year at advent. Dark skinned people in America have been described as less than since they were brought here in chains or found here and subjugated. Dark skinned people in India have been seen as being lower class. Dark skinned people in China have historically been undesirable.
These prejudices grew out of a desire to maintain or regain power. We held Africans in slavery and used language as both a rationality for that slavery and a means of perpetuating it. Light is good. Dark is bad. Light is of God, dark of the devil. To a certain extent we still see things that way. Everywhere we look today is the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Amen to that. Black Lives Matter.
And it’s particularly important for us here, in this room with few black faces, to believe this with conviction. Chris Rock this week was quoted as saying, “Black folk haven’t changed. White folk have changed.” White folk have seen the possibility of recognizing the inherent worth of all people. We need so much more of this. This is making straight the way.
What has been happening in and about Ferguson in and about New York is shining a light on our darkness. We have lived for so long with systematic racism that we must shine a brighter light on it to see it. But unlike the story of the little girl afraid of the dark and the youth afraid of the manure, shining a light on it is not enough. Our fear will not go away by simply looking at the situation and understanding it.
We sang this morning, “when God is like a child.” Because my child is light I can send her out in our neighborhood to visit her friends without having “the talk.” I have had talks with her about how to be safe, but we haven’t talked to her about how to behave with a police officer. I haven’t had to. But if my child were dark, especially if I had a son, I would have to. I read about a group of black mothers who sat on a panel and told people what they had told their sons about how to stay safe.
They tell their sons to keep their license and registration out in the open while they drive so they do not have to reach for anything if stopped by an officer. They tell their sons to keep their hands out of their pockets and to say, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” They tell their sons not to walk down the street with more than one friend, lest they be seen as a gang or a mob. They tell their sons that they should not just be humble, but be prepared to be humiliated without responding. They talked of a 12 year old son who was stopped by the police for fitting a description. He was frisked. He was frightened. He was two blocks from home and wanted to run to his mom. He told her this, crying. She realized that she had forgotten to tell him not to run. She told him right then, never to run from the police. “They will shoot you,” she said. And then she cried.
I know this may seem far off and remote to many of us. But it could happen here. When I was interviewing I heard the story of the stabbing that happened just off our property. They had attended an event held at our church and when they were asked to leave for behaving poorly things escalated in the parking lot.
In one sense our response was beautiful. We wanted to find a way to continue to be a place of welcome. In another sense it perpetuated the types of attitudes and responses that feed into systemic racism. We actually agreed to a policy that would create different church rules for people from a particular ethnic group. These policies made sense when thinking about renting our space to the same group of people again, the ones who were loud enough to annoy our neighbors and out of control enough to stab someone. But they make no sense when thinking about the whole of an ethnic group.
I have read Pastor Mark’s conversations with the Moorhead police department and have talked about this issue with the trustees and the moderator and the deacons. I know that all parties involved came from a place of welcome. But I also see the legacy of an historically racist culture coming out in the conversations.
A woman came in last week, asking for information about having her wedding here. She happened to be a part of this particular ethnic group. She was excited about her wedding. She loved seeing the church and imagining herself standing here marrying the man she will spend her life with. And then there was this uncomfortable conversation about the time of her event and the need to hire security, because of her ethnicity. I wonder what this felt like to her.
When I was in college I was one of very few white students who studied extensively in the Black Studies Department. I had a couple of experiences there that gave me a personal, emotional peak into racism. The first was a teacher, the dean of the department, who said in his opening line to his class, “When I started teaching I didn’t want to teach no crackers.” I had to ask my friend what “cracker” meant. Later in the semester I made a comment about two books by Chiek Anta Diop, a famous historian who was the first to posit that humanity originated in Africa. The teacher told me I had misunderstood the text. Two minutes later an African American student made the same comment. The teacher told him he had the makings of a master’s thesis. I could have complained about these comments, but this man, the dean of the department, had to personally sign off on my major. I did not want to risk not being able to graduate in my chosen field.
Another semester I was taking a class called “Black Fiction.” In the first class the teacher told us how she had been an English major at the same school and how she could never get anything higher than a B. It didn’t matter how much she studied or how much she researched or how well written her work was, nothing higher than a B. She understood it to be racism. She told us she didn’t give white students anything higher than a C. I was determined to be the first. I worked very hard on my midterm and got a C. I worked even harder on my final and got a C. I took an incomplete and worked for months on a re-write, gathering as much critique and comment as I could from other sources. Still, I got a C. It was the only C I received in college. I had even Aced the “I don’t want to teach no crackers” class.
These teachers were right about one thing. These experiences taught me more about systemic racism than any research could have. I was wrong because I was white. I was unable to get an A because I was white.
Now, let’s put this in perspective. These were two out of many classes I took. I had other Black Studies courses where my skin color made no difference. In my life since I dare say my ethnicity has not been a hindrance. And these two situations were not life threatening.
When thinking about the systemic issues that led to the situation in Ferguson and the ones that led to the altercation outside our building, the stakes are higher. Our police officers are heavily armed, some with military grade assault weapons. These weapons are meant to kill. When police officers respond to any situation deadly force is an option.
This is an issue, no matter your skin color, but, just like my experience in the Black Studies classes, and the bride’s experience here last week, skin color brings different expectations. In Ferguson, as with many other young black men, the assumptions of those with whom we interact differ based on our skin color, our ethnicity.
As I see it, two things need to change in our culture. The first is the militarization of the police. Deadly force is too easy of an option. Should not our highly trained professional Peace Officers be trained first and foremost in peaceful tactics, such as how to diffuse a situation that is potentially violent? No where is this need more apparent than in the recent death of 12 year old Tamir Rice. He was in the park playing with a toy gun. Police were called. A police office arrived and killed him within seconds of exiting his vehicle. There was no attempt to resolve the situation peacefully.
The second thing that needs to change, in each of us, is seeing a person as the color of their skin. Treat each encounter and each person on their own merits. I learned something from my part in the awkward conversation with the bride last week. I should have listened more to her individual story. I should have asked more questions about her.
I should have come to the experience with a beginner’s mind, from a quiet center. And yet I came to it full of my own complex feelings about our history with her assumed community. I assume the same is true of the police officers involved with Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner…
I own my complicity in the situation in our community. We are changing our policy, taking race and ethnicity out of the equation, while still applying limits learned from the stabbing. My prayer for the bride who was here is that she has a day filled with unencumbered joy in a place that fully welcomes her family. I hope we can be that place and know that if we can not, I have learned something in the process that makes me a better person.
The way is never straight, but if you focus on just the one step in front of you, that one can be straight. You can make that one step straight. And that is what we are called to do, focus on the one step right in front of you. The one person in front of you. See them for what they are, not the assumptions you bring to it. Find the centered, light place in your soul, the place where you are most connected to God, and act out of that place as often as you can. This is making straight the way. May it be so.
Sunday December 14th, 2014
Christmas Pageant
Christmas Pageant
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Sunday, December 21st
Martin Luther has been quoted as saying, "Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise."
So, praise to you the liturgist for reading the word of God. And, then, praise to Linda Boyd and her coordination of our music. There are wonderful times when the word of God and music coincide, like in our scripture reading today. Mary has just visited her aunt, Elizabeth. Sparked by the movement of her own child, ineutero, she proclaims Mary as the mother of the Messiah. Mary’s response is to break out in song.
It is part of a liturgical tradition of telling the story of Christ’s birth through songs. The four songs contained in the story are Mary's Magnificat; Zechariah's Benedictus (1:67-79); the angels' Gloria in Excelsis (2:13-14); and Simeon's Nunc Dimittis (2:28-32).[1] These songs pre-date other writing in the Christian Scriptures, for it was first in song that our rituals were handed down. Following this tradition, the Christmas story goes like this
Mary praises God for honoring her
The angels proclaim Christ’s birth
Zechariah proclaims his son, John, a prophet
Simeon proclaims Jesus the salvation
This is a story about praise and proclamation, a story told in song, long before it was written down because music helps us remember.
When I became a mom, I was just a few weeks out of grad school. I took on motherhood as a grad-school topic. I had four parenting books that were divided by stages of development. I read all four books before every stage of development. One of them suggested that toddlers will listen to instructions better if you sing them. I learned a little ditty in a toddler program and sang it for everything. “Put the crayons in the box, in the box. Put the crayons in the box, it’s where they want to be, put the crayons in the box, in the box.” There’s a more common one, many of you probably know. You can sing it with me. “Clean-up, clean-up, everybody, everywhere, clean-up, clean-up everybody do your share.”
This example of giving toddlers instructions through music is interesting to me. First of all, it doesn’t have to be artistically good music. Neither of those ditties are great, and neither is my ability to perform them. What I find so interesting is that toddlers are learning how to assert their own will. They commonly say “no” to everything. “Can you put the crayon in the box?” “No.” “Do you want to help clean-up?” “No.” Their ability to assert their will is fascinating to them, but not as fascinating as something with rhyme, rhythm and tempo. By putting the instruction into song you engage different parts of their brain.
It’s the same way with people experiencing diseases that affect your memory. They can get confused, or seem to have lost all memory, but music has the power to engage them. There was a woman in my last church, who passed away right before I moved here. I had been called to her bedside because hospice said she could pass at anytime. But when I arrived she had rallied. She was sitting up in the dining room, eating lunch. She didn’t know who I was. This wasn’t surprising. It had been at least a year since she recognized me, a relative new comer in her life. I was trying to engage her in conversation, but she didn’t recognize the names of her children or her husband. So I took out my phone and played this song, Ella Fitzgerald- Thanks for the memories. She told me about dancing with her husband in the USO. I said, “He must have been handsome in his uniform.” She smiled and said, “yes.”
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat
So, praise to you the liturgist for reading the word of God. And, then, praise to Linda Boyd and her coordination of our music. There are wonderful times when the word of God and music coincide, like in our scripture reading today. Mary has just visited her aunt, Elizabeth. Sparked by the movement of her own child, ineutero, she proclaims Mary as the mother of the Messiah. Mary’s response is to break out in song.
It is part of a liturgical tradition of telling the story of Christ’s birth through songs. The four songs contained in the story are Mary's Magnificat; Zechariah's Benedictus (1:67-79); the angels' Gloria in Excelsis (2:13-14); and Simeon's Nunc Dimittis (2:28-32).[1] These songs pre-date other writing in the Christian Scriptures, for it was first in song that our rituals were handed down. Following this tradition, the Christmas story goes like this
Mary praises God for honoring her
The angels proclaim Christ’s birth
Zechariah proclaims his son, John, a prophet
Simeon proclaims Jesus the salvation
This is a story about praise and proclamation, a story told in song, long before it was written down because music helps us remember.
When I became a mom, I was just a few weeks out of grad school. I took on motherhood as a grad-school topic. I had four parenting books that were divided by stages of development. I read all four books before every stage of development. One of them suggested that toddlers will listen to instructions better if you sing them. I learned a little ditty in a toddler program and sang it for everything. “Put the crayons in the box, in the box. Put the crayons in the box, it’s where they want to be, put the crayons in the box, in the box.” There’s a more common one, many of you probably know. You can sing it with me. “Clean-up, clean-up, everybody, everywhere, clean-up, clean-up everybody do your share.”
This example of giving toddlers instructions through music is interesting to me. First of all, it doesn’t have to be artistically good music. Neither of those ditties are great, and neither is my ability to perform them. What I find so interesting is that toddlers are learning how to assert their own will. They commonly say “no” to everything. “Can you put the crayon in the box?” “No.” “Do you want to help clean-up?” “No.” Their ability to assert their will is fascinating to them, but not as fascinating as something with rhyme, rhythm and tempo. By putting the instruction into song you engage different parts of their brain.
It’s the same way with people experiencing diseases that affect your memory. They can get confused, or seem to have lost all memory, but music has the power to engage them. There was a woman in my last church, who passed away right before I moved here. I had been called to her bedside because hospice said she could pass at anytime. But when I arrived she had rallied. She was sitting up in the dining room, eating lunch. She didn’t know who I was. This wasn’t surprising. It had been at least a year since she recognized me, a relative new comer in her life. I was trying to engage her in conversation, but she didn’t recognize the names of her children or her husband. So I took out my phone and played this song, Ella Fitzgerald- Thanks for the memories. She told me about dancing with her husband in the USO. I said, “He must have been handsome in his uniform.” She smiled and said, “yes.”
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat
I saw a TED talk
this week by Robert Gupta, a violinist, who gave music lessons to Nathanial
Anthony Ayers, a brilliantly talented, Julliard trained bassist who suffers
from schizophrenia. He describes one
session when Nathanial is in the midst of his psychosis, complaining about
smoke and the people who are listening in on him at night and trying to get
him. Instead of trying to reason with
him, or discuss musical theory as they sometimes did, he just started
playing. The music reached into
Nathanial’s brain- past the delusions, and brought him to the present
moment. Nathanial experiences music as
we might experience a relationship with a friend. It speaks to him, comforts him. It is the only therapy he will take for his
disease.
Music is next to
the word of God not just because Martin Luther loved it, but because of the
ways that it can reach inside of us and change us. This is why the moments of transformation in
the birth narratives of Jesus existed first in song.
Mary was in her adolescence. The music of our adolescence is particularly important as it gets hard wired into our emotional cortex. When we hear a song that is attached to a particularly emotional experience from our adolescence, our brains are flooded with neuro-chemicals that bring back those emotions. For me it’s Journey, Cyndi Lauper, Iron Maden, Prince, Amy Grant, Queen, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode, the Beatles, U2- and because I’ve always been a church geek- In the Garden, Spirit, Ode to Joy. I remember one night laying on a driveway with my best friend staring up at the stars, singing Billy Idol, The Dead Next Door. I thought I had the world figured out for the first time in my life. It felt deep in a way I hadn’t experienced depth before. I am transported back there anytime I hear that song, just like my elderly friend was transported back to the USO.
Mary was in her adolescence. The music of our adolescence is particularly important as it gets hard wired into our emotional cortex. When we hear a song that is attached to a particularly emotional experience from our adolescence, our brains are flooded with neuro-chemicals that bring back those emotions. For me it’s Journey, Cyndi Lauper, Iron Maden, Prince, Amy Grant, Queen, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode, the Beatles, U2- and because I’ve always been a church geek- In the Garden, Spirit, Ode to Joy. I remember one night laying on a driveway with my best friend staring up at the stars, singing Billy Idol, The Dead Next Door. I thought I had the world figured out for the first time in my life. It felt deep in a way I hadn’t experienced depth before. I am transported back there anytime I hear that song, just like my elderly friend was transported back to the USO.
Music engages our
brain in so many ways.
“When we first hear a song, it stimulates our auditory cortex and we convert the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies into a coherent whole. From there, our reaction to music depends on how we interact with it. Sing along to a song in your head, and you’ll activate your premotor cortex, which helps plan and coordinate movements. Dance along, and your neurons will synchronize with the beat of the music. Pay close attention to the lyrics and instrumentation, and you’ll activate your parietal cortex, which helps you shift and maintain attention to different stimuli. Listen to a song that triggers personal memories, and your prefrontal cortex, which maintains information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action.”[1]
Having music stored in all these different places is another reason why it is such an important way to reach those with memory issues. If one part of the brain is experiencing a deficit, another may be able to remember the music and engage. If we experience the world through one primary mode, say through logic and math, music can engage with us there, or say through kinesthetic input, music can engage with us there.
If I asked you to repeat two sentences I said during this sermon, you would probably be hard pressed to do so, no matter how focused your attention is on my words. But, I bet you can name one of the two songs I’ve played, or sing the little ditty about the crayon. This is because we remember somewhere around 30% of what we say and 70% of what we sing.
There is a reason Martin Luther didn’t mention preaching as next to the word of God. I might make a point or tell a story that makes a connection with something in your own experience- and you will remember it. You might even have an impactful a-ha moment as a result of something I say, but it will never reach as broadly into your psyche as music. Preaching doesn’t even have the same objective potential to effect change as does the couple of minutes of centering we do at the beginning of worship.
Starting my sermon by thanking [the liturgist] and then thanking Linda was not just a hook to get your attention. It really was the meat of this sermon. The earliest Christian liturgies were music because it is an effective way of transmitting what is important. It engages so much more of who you are and who you can become than a sermon.
The most intensely spiritual experience I have had here so far was the Sunday we practiced singing meditation. There was a moment in the silence after the singing where I could feel how the air was charged- the energy in the room had changed, deepened. Billy Idol has nothing on that moment. There have been similar moments, for me, just after the choir sings. In the split second before people clap. One Sunday we just sat with it. No one clapped. That felt like the deepest compliment.
I guess this is all to say how important Linda’s work has been for us. I know I am a late comer to her talents, but I appreciate her so much. I know her gifts will be missed. There will be times when our brains hear a note or a musical phrase that remind us of her, and we will anticipate the musicality she would have put into it or pulled from us into it and the experience of a different musicality will leave us with a moment of surprise and a small space in our soul that misses her gifts. This is ok. It is right to miss someone who has given us so much.
My prayer for us is that we can hold our loss and simultaneously be open to welcoming a new director. My prayer for Linda is that she can honor what she misses about her work here, while simultaneously throwing herself into her new adventures and figuring out what it means to be a member of a church where she is not employed. May it be so. Amen.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html
“When we first hear a song, it stimulates our auditory cortex and we convert the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies into a coherent whole. From there, our reaction to music depends on how we interact with it. Sing along to a song in your head, and you’ll activate your premotor cortex, which helps plan and coordinate movements. Dance along, and your neurons will synchronize with the beat of the music. Pay close attention to the lyrics and instrumentation, and you’ll activate your parietal cortex, which helps you shift and maintain attention to different stimuli. Listen to a song that triggers personal memories, and your prefrontal cortex, which maintains information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action.”[1]
Having music stored in all these different places is another reason why it is such an important way to reach those with memory issues. If one part of the brain is experiencing a deficit, another may be able to remember the music and engage. If we experience the world through one primary mode, say through logic and math, music can engage with us there, or say through kinesthetic input, music can engage with us there.
If I asked you to repeat two sentences I said during this sermon, you would probably be hard pressed to do so, no matter how focused your attention is on my words. But, I bet you can name one of the two songs I’ve played, or sing the little ditty about the crayon. This is because we remember somewhere around 30% of what we say and 70% of what we sing.
There is a reason Martin Luther didn’t mention preaching as next to the word of God. I might make a point or tell a story that makes a connection with something in your own experience- and you will remember it. You might even have an impactful a-ha moment as a result of something I say, but it will never reach as broadly into your psyche as music. Preaching doesn’t even have the same objective potential to effect change as does the couple of minutes of centering we do at the beginning of worship.
Starting my sermon by thanking [the liturgist] and then thanking Linda was not just a hook to get your attention. It really was the meat of this sermon. The earliest Christian liturgies were music because it is an effective way of transmitting what is important. It engages so much more of who you are and who you can become than a sermon.
The most intensely spiritual experience I have had here so far was the Sunday we practiced singing meditation. There was a moment in the silence after the singing where I could feel how the air was charged- the energy in the room had changed, deepened. Billy Idol has nothing on that moment. There have been similar moments, for me, just after the choir sings. In the split second before people clap. One Sunday we just sat with it. No one clapped. That felt like the deepest compliment.
I guess this is all to say how important Linda’s work has been for us. I know I am a late comer to her talents, but I appreciate her so much. I know her gifts will be missed. There will be times when our brains hear a note or a musical phrase that remind us of her, and we will anticipate the musicality she would have put into it or pulled from us into it and the experience of a different musicality will leave us with a moment of surprise and a small space in our soul that misses her gifts. This is ok. It is right to miss someone who has given us so much.
My prayer for us is that we can hold our loss and simultaneously be open to welcoming a new director. My prayer for Linda is that she can honor what she misses about her work here, while simultaneously throwing herself into her new adventures and figuring out what it means to be a member of a church where she is not employed. May it be so. Amen.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html
Christmas Eve 2014
Our world is a
place of darkness
Fully half our lives
Lived
About face from light
Our world is a place hostile to darkness
Dark faces
Running scared from those
Tasked with protecting us
Our world is darkness marching
Shedding light
On centuries of
Dark thoughts acted out in our name
But here in these walls
There is a light
Building walls of welcome,
We enter here from
A deep, dark place of anger
with almost walls
and a dulled sense of justice
It is impossible to see there.
It is impossible to be there
or to get out
Fury is in us
folding comfort into an abyss
It is a piece of us
and we protest through it with blind feet, searching
Suddenly a light
into the darkness
the darkness cannot overcome it.
A distant glow against a stable wall,
soft,
focusing fuzzy edges on the almost seen world
It is a warmth on the horizon,
a piece of us so distant we do not recognize it.
Edges of light grow and dance like an angel across a face we almost see
candle light dancing
on a tender rose at the point of blooming
fragile under the patriarchal weight of almost legitimacy
heavy with the burden of divine joy within her
without her
through her
she bears it
she bears us
she bears down
and the light breaks forth into the gentle night
the sound of lungs out of the softness
of sweet stable smells
sings joy! into our anger
and the joy was flesh
joy! lives here
with us
in us
beside the fury
surrounding our darkness, never over come
We are in the streets,
tending,
in the midst of the fury.
Suddenly joy! bounces into our hearts,
we sing
we dance blind
through the frosty grass of midnight
a wave is washing us
washing over us
rising through us
breaking into divine light, dancing in the sky like angels,
hosts of angels
armies of angels
marching peace throughout our souls.
We abound into the knowledge
that the still small light, the joy of flesh
the search light breaking forth from the stable is for us
each of us
in our ordinariness
in our uniqueness
in our divine-ness
in the midst of our human-ness is the divine joy! of light,
the divine light of love
reaching for each and every one of us no matter who,
no matter where
in a welcome extravagant enough to transcend the helplessness of infants
the foul stench of stable stalls
and the lowliness of those for whom we have no room
in here
In here is the love of God
reaching for every molecule of your being
In here is the light of Christ
surrounding your fury,
thriving in the midst of your darkness,
seeking
searching
feeling
reaching
for you to reach back.
Reach back.
Reach,
Like the dark faces of wisdom who
Gifted Christ with their most precious possessions
Reach,
Like the outcast, sick, and oppressed who
Gifted Christ with the proclamation “I am,”
Reach,
Like the fabled drummer boy
Who had nothing to give but the music of his soul,
Reach for the smallest of babies
the frailest of humans
the deepest of eyes
this Christ,
this child
from whom joy! is light is love
for you.
Amen.
Fully half our lives
Lived
About face from light
Our world is a place hostile to darkness
Dark faces
Running scared from those
Tasked with protecting us
Our world is darkness marching
Shedding light
On centuries of
Dark thoughts acted out in our name
But here in these walls
There is a light
Building walls of welcome,
We enter here from
A deep, dark place of anger
with almost walls
and a dulled sense of justice
It is impossible to see there.
It is impossible to be there
or to get out
Fury is in us
folding comfort into an abyss
It is a piece of us
and we protest through it with blind feet, searching
Suddenly a light
into the darkness
the darkness cannot overcome it.
A distant glow against a stable wall,
soft,
focusing fuzzy edges on the almost seen world
It is a warmth on the horizon,
a piece of us so distant we do not recognize it.
Edges of light grow and dance like an angel across a face we almost see
candle light dancing
on a tender rose at the point of blooming
fragile under the patriarchal weight of almost legitimacy
heavy with the burden of divine joy within her
without her
through her
she bears it
she bears us
she bears down
and the light breaks forth into the gentle night
the sound of lungs out of the softness
of sweet stable smells
sings joy! into our anger
and the joy was flesh
joy! lives here
with us
in us
beside the fury
surrounding our darkness, never over come
We are in the streets,
tending,
in the midst of the fury.
Suddenly joy! bounces into our hearts,
we sing
we dance blind
through the frosty grass of midnight
a wave is washing us
washing over us
rising through us
breaking into divine light, dancing in the sky like angels,
hosts of angels
armies of angels
marching peace throughout our souls.
We abound into the knowledge
that the still small light, the joy of flesh
the search light breaking forth from the stable is for us
each of us
in our ordinariness
in our uniqueness
in our divine-ness
in the midst of our human-ness is the divine joy! of light,
the divine light of love
reaching for each and every one of us no matter who,
no matter where
in a welcome extravagant enough to transcend the helplessness of infants
the foul stench of stable stalls
and the lowliness of those for whom we have no room
in here
In here is the love of God
reaching for every molecule of your being
In here is the light of Christ
surrounding your fury,
thriving in the midst of your darkness,
seeking
searching
feeling
reaching
for you to reach back.
Reach back.
Reach,
Like the dark faces of wisdom who
Gifted Christ with their most precious possessions
Reach,
Like the outcast, sick, and oppressed who
Gifted Christ with the proclamation “I am,”
Reach,
Like the fabled drummer boy
Who had nothing to give but the music of his soul,
Reach for the smallest of babies
the frailest of humans
the deepest of eyes
this Christ,
this child
from whom joy! is light is love
for you.
Amen.
