ASGW Sleepy Hollow (ep 9)

Sleepy Hollow episode 10 airs tonight.  Only 3 more left!  I wonder if I'll manage to watch season 2.  This is the first season of TV since... I dunno, TNG that I have managed to watch a show every week.  I think it has something to do with the fact that the episodes are online, so I can watch them even when I'm away or forgetful.

Episode 9 was mostly about developing the various charactes' backstories.  For one, I so called it: Ichabod and Katrina had a baby.  A son, specifically, which will probably be important later on.  There was also some slight development in Abbie's story too, but not a whole lot.  Surprisingly, the captain got his fair share as well; we met his ex-wife and daughter for the first time, and his daughter was given some significant screen time.

This, if I may digress a bit, is why Sleepy Hollow rocks and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D doesn't.  Sleepy Hollow takes the time to put a kid on screen and give her her own monologue to establish her voice and backstory.  And she's just a supporting character, with no promise she'll ever even come back. Agents is so caught up in explaining the McGuffin of the week that we still don't know who the 6 top-billed characters are, and since we don't know, we don't care.  The only episode of Agents that really did any character-building was the one where Simmons got the alien flu.  Even Coulson explaining how Melinda May got the nickname "the cavalry" doesn't give us any insight into her character.  She's still a cipher, like everyone else on the show.

Anyway, nothing really objectionable in ep 9 for Sleepy Hollow except for the main antagonist.  Why does an Ancient Near Eastern god whose main characteristic is worship involving child sacrifice have a servant made of tree roots from deciduous North America?  I'm waiting to see if there is ever a connection between Molech's worship and Ichabod's and Katrina's child, but I'm not holding my breath.  There was no indication of it in the episode.

Ok, maybe, maybe you could draw something from Abbie's line, "As soon as your son was born, the creature attacked," but that sounds more like the baby is some kind of mystic key (hey, he's the child of a witch, right?), not that Molech needs more child sacrifice.

Speaking of Katrina, one nitpicky bit:  Why is the letter Ichabod wrote to her in case he was killed on the battlefield folded up and hidden in a book when she was right there when he died to cast the spell that kept him alive? preserved? in some kind of magical stasis? for 200+ years?

Also, after the first episode where Ichabod met her, Katrina has looked and dressed nothing like an 18th century Quaker.  I think I already addressed that as Katrina Van Tassel, a Dutch woman in rural New York, she shouldn't be a Quaker at all.  Oh I didn't?  Well, she shouldn't. Quakers were British and largely centered around Philadelphia.  They could have made her Mennonite, which would have fit better, actually.  Mennonites were/are pacifists, like the Quakers, and the Plain Mennonites grew out of the German immigrants, not the Dutch.  So it wouldn't have been out of place for her to wear those fancy dresses and jewelry.  Also, Quakers were disowned if they married non-Quakers, and Abraham was obviously not a Quaker. 

See?  I should be hired as a TV/movie research assistant.

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episodes 7 & 8)

blogablogablog.

So yeah, I took a break from blogging Sleepy Hollow for 2 reasons:  1) I was trying to finish my Ph.D. applications (done!) and 2) Thanksgiving in Arizona.

And in retrospect 3) these two episodes are basically a two-parter, with ep 8 picking right up on the cliffhanger ending of ep 7 and finishing out the story.

These episodes were great.  I got the feeling that they were setting up for what would have been the ending if the show hadn't been renewed for a second season, but it was, so they ended up just being a really tightly written adventure.

However, since this blog series is all about the problems with the show, let's get to criticizing!

UV lights can substitute for the sun in magic.  What?  It's magic.  There's something special about the sun, daylight, and good and evil.  While it was awesome to see the headless horseman start to smoke from the lights, replacing magic with science and technology is always uncertain ground to walk on, and I wasn't convinced that GE can project anti-evil.

Also, those are totally not Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

One thing they got very right, although I don't know if it was on purpose, was Captain Irving's emphasis on the word "scientifically" when explaining to Ichabod that DNA evidence had established that there are descendants of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson.  An educated man from the 18th century Enlightenment would definitely respect anything backed up by "science."  But then, our own culture is so heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, it's hard to know if the writers had to even take Ichabod's cultural moment into consideration.

On the other hand, it was so awesome seeing Abbie teach Ichabod about what a fist-bump means :)

And watching Ichabod try not to be seduced by an internet porn popup is characteristic of why I love this show!  To say nothing of his voicemail to Abbie.

staying connected.

i graduated in may, ended my internship at a church, and i haven't been back to a church, any church building or local community, since.

This is not really a good thing.  i do realize this.

Not precisely as defense, but as explanation, the church i was a member, employee, and leader of before i left to go to seminary full-time and work at my internship was somewhat abusive.  Because of the senior pastor's insecurities and ambition, the community i had been a part of was dissolved by the leadership.  This happened 2 weeks after i had gone to a new church to intern.

Part of the problem is also that i went from being a leader in a community to being a seminarian-intern, another leadership position.  i've been teaching in churches for the last 4 years, and i've been a resource for church leaders for even longer than that.

The prospect of finding a new community to worship with is exhausting.

Also the problem is that i have some strong theological and ecclesiological commitments these days, and part of what i would be looking for in a church is either closely shared ideological stances, or openness to them.  i'm really not willing to compromise on women being in ministry, the church adopting missional ecclesiology, following and supporting social justice, or a belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures and the supernatural.  This puts me in a very awkward position, half liberal, half evangelical.  both sides have things that irritate me.

i want a church that believes in the resurrection, that believes that Jesus' followers are empowered by the Spirit sent by the Father, that believes that "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:27 NRSV).

And i've been hurt.  A few weeks ago, we were staying with my parents, and i couldn't go to church with them.  the prospect of stepping inside that building stressed me out and upset me so much.

But see, this is where things like the lectionary come in.  For the last couple years, i've been buying these devotionals that follow the lectionary with ancient christian commentary.  Paleo-orthodoxy has its own problems, but i'm a historian, and reading what my brothers and sisters left behind as relics from their spiritual journeys makes me feel connected to them.  Also, reading with the lectionary allows me to follow the church year and the same scripture readings along with the huge numbers of other christians who do the same.  So i just bought myself the volume for the "A" year, as well as the Episcopal Church's book "Holy Men, Holy Women," which is something like a calendar of saints, but a little more contemporary, yes, liberal, and Protestantized.

It's not real community, but it's the best i can do for now.  Sort of my Advent longing.

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 6)

wah. so i was out of town last week and didn't get to post onthe last episode of Sleepy Hollow.  Am doing it now quickly before tonight's!

Ok, so continuing biblical problems: which horseman are they running from?  Seriously, people.  Just go back and read Revelation 6 again and decide what the hell you're doing.  Because the Headless Horseman is death, but he's the last horseman to emerge in chapter 6, not the first.  *sigh*

However, their definition of sin got really weird.  First thing you notice from the Sin Eater's sanctifying scene is that you define what's sin for you.  So if another redcoat had gone out and shot Arthur Bernard but didn't feel guilty about it, it wouldn't be sin?

And then, wait, what is Ichabod feeling all guilty about?  That he couldn't save the man from getting shot by a demon?  But it was totally ok for him to torture the guy?  No regret at all about torturing a man for days, but he fails at saving him from a demon and this is what connects him with "sin incarnate"?  I don't know if this is just callousness at torture's current position in American society or if the dialogue was handled/cut/edited badly, but it seems really weird to me that Ichabod would be totally ok with torturing a guy but then would flagellate himself over failing to save him in the woods, at night, from a demon.

On the other side,  I totally loved that Katrina can contact Abbie as well.  And was there a hint that Katrina and Ichabod had a baby?  In her vision, Abbie sees this baby carriage (and also note the toy in the bed) and hears a baby crying.  But of course it all turns creepy.  More to come, hopefully...

ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 5 - now with screenshots!)

so i was really looking forward to watching sleepy hollow last night and letting my brain turn to mush after a second PhD open house in less than a week.  but it was a rerun of the pilot, bah.

on the other hand, this gives me the chance to catch the blog up since i missed episode 5 last week.

there wasn't really any theology in ep 5, but there was a ton of awful history.  so here we go!

well, ok, first up: the horseman of pestilence.  also conquest because that actually follows the text of Revelation 6.  but why is he dressed as a samurai?

But, the major problem in this episode was historical:  a kid from the colony of Roanoke speaks Middle English. 

um.  no.

as wikipedia helpfully points out, Roanoke was a colony in North Carolina, founded in 1585 and disappeared sometime after the first recorded birth in the colony in 1587.

Middle English started to fade away in 1470.  it was replaced (again, wikipedia) by a dialect from London.  so the colony of Roanoke was founded slightly over 100 years after Middle English started to die out.  Also, let's please note that most of the colonists came from London or the south of England and so were closer to the linguistic shift and even less likely to still speak Middle English.  not only that, but the 1580s were well into the Great Vowel Shift, especially in the south, making Middle English even less likely.

further, Ichabod Crane is an Oxford history professor in this telling (in the original, he's just a schoolmaster).  the chances of a history professor being fluent in Middle English by the late 18th century are slim to none.

a seminary grad watches "sleepy hollow" (ep 1 & 4)

i am watching and loving the new tv show "sleepy hollow," but they are getting just about everything wrong about christianity and a lot wrong about history too.  so since fact-checking is all the rage, i think it's going to be fun to blog through the season (already renewed for a second, woo!) noting all the silliness.  potential spoilers, be warned.

unfortunately, i don't know a whole lot about native american religion, so i'm just assuming they got the Iroquois sandman-dream demon in episode 3 as wrong as they got everything else :)

i posted my initial reaction to the pilot already, but let's flesh it out a bit more. 

the apparently Roman Catholic priest who gets beheaded in the pilot is dressed as a cardinal.  what?

Ichabod reads Rev 6:1 and 6:7 as both referring to the headless horseman, who is identified as "death" (the other 3 are war, pestilence, and famine).  problem #1: 6:1 is talking about war, and 6:7 is talking about death.  problem #2: the series has death as the first horseman, but in Revelation, death is the last (hence 6:7).**

then he appears to keep reading and refers to 2 witnesses.  in Rev 6, there is a multitude, not 2.  so what the heck is going on?

that answer comes out a bit better in ep 4.  Jenny and Abbie were conveniently dragged to bible study as kids and forced to memorize scripture passages.  helpfully, they both memorized Revelation, apparently.  the two witnesses come from Rev 11:3, although the show leaves out the "in sackcloth" part of the quote.

more problems in episode 4:  the final demon summoning takes place in what apparently is a Dutch Reformed church, except the first shot of the church's interior shows a statue of a female saint or the virgin Mary.  not only is the Dutch Reformed tradition exceedingly Protestant so there would definitely be no statue of a saint or Mary, but it's also part of the Prot tradition that removed all art from churches, so there shouldn't be any statue at all (the same goes for the stained glass windows).  another problem is that as far as i could tell, they put the book on what appears to be not a lectern, but a portable baptismal font.  which is fine, except that the demons also come out of a font in the  middle of the room.  what church would have 2 fonts?

the book, referred to as "the lesser key of Solomon" was supposedly written by king Solomon and found during the crusades by the Knights Templar.  problem here:  they say "twelve centuries later" except that Solomon lived closer to 900 BCE, so it should be twenty two centuries later.  and there were no such things a books in 900 BCE; it should be a scroll.  assuming it's the actual parchment that Solomon wrote on, which since it's a book of black magic, i'm willing to suspend disbelief on that one :)  (Solomon gets the tradition of being a magician and sorcerer eventually, so i'm not going to criticize them for picking up on that).  fun thought: if this is the "lesser key of Solomon" is there a greater key out there somewhere?

i just laughed when Ichabod referred to Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a "theological text."  if you want to know who Moloch/Molech is, go read Leviticus, and I and II Kings.  and i'm pretty sure the last shot of the illustration in the book is William Blake (who is my most favourite crazy poet ever).

**in keeping with the series context, i'm giving all links to Bible passages in KJV.

intervention

i have been thinking about this whole Syria thing, and wondering what a good Christian, Christ-like,  response is.  i do believe that God calls God's people to intervene and offer relief to the suffering innocent, and that relief is real, physical, this-world relief, not just a promise of some kind of vague spiritual paradise.  but i also believe that Jesus taught a non-violent way.  and quite honestly, we've seen the results of violent intervention all over the middle east, and there's no reason to believe that Syria would be any different.

so this is the conundrum.  how do you intervene in the suffering of the innocent but without violence?

and it kind of hit me, well, isn't that what the cross is?  in becoming a victim of violence, Jesus conquered violence.  in receiving the ultimate judicial punishment that humans can devise, the cross stands as a rebuke against violence and death.  but even more so, by God becoming human and dying, God conquers death.  the way of Jesus, the way of the cross, is to offer oneself to suffer with the innocent and to gain power precisely in the abdication of violent, judicial power.

so i think the Christian response to what's going on in Syria ought to be to line up like the Freedom Riders and the lunch counter protesters of the civil rights movement and take the violence on us.  take the bombs and the gas and bullets and stand there in defiance of that violence.

it won't happen, of course.  for one, i can already think of hundreds of logistical objections, and Christians really aren't used to working in partnership globally.  we're more used to fighting each other.  and it's incredibly rare to hear Christian preaching that says, hey, give up your life.  no, really.  give it up like Jesus did.  we hear more about how to steward our finances and improve our relationships and do good, practical things to work for social justice (and these sermons, btw, have nothing to do with liberal or conservative).

Christianity has become so wedded to political, judicial power that we don't really take the "give up everything" call of Jesus seriously.  this is true both in western state and culture as well as in the middle east.  we can't answer that call anymore because we don't know how.  we are too used to having that kind of power that we've forgotten to look for solutions that don't use it.  but we've seen the results of intervening in a society nonviolently too, with the civil rights movement here, and India's independence movement, and the path that took Christianity from an illegal, persecuted sect to precisely that political power that it is today.

and as strongly as i feel this conviction, i know i won't go myself because this kind of widespread, systemic violence is precisely why we have the body of Christ.  i could go over there, and die, and maybe my husband or parents would publicize the story, but it wouldn't cause mass change in the Church Universal.  so i'm blogging instead, and learning a lesson and looking for somewhere here in my local life to intervene nonviolently.

but also, i believe that the local, Syrian Christians have a responsibility to their neighbours, and i'm not saying they're not hearing God or whatever and they're terrible Christians.  they show us in the west everything that is wrong about Christian power wedded to state power.  they are our mirror, not our scapegoat.  it's our fault too.  but Christians are in a place and a location and a culture, and the success stories are largely the stories of Christians acting from within their own culture, not from outsiders.

but imagine if Christians globally flooded Syria and stood between the innocent Muslim children and the violence of soldiers on both sides.  imagine what could be the result of that.  that, i propose, would be a picture of God's throne in heaven.

identity and terms.

Last Sunday, CNN.com published this post by Rachel Held Evans.

While I sympathize with her sentiments, there are some problems with the post.  I don't know how much of it was due to her and how much of it was due to the CNN editors, so don't take everything I say as criticism of Ms. Evans.

The first problem with the post is the title.  "The Church" it says.  Except in her post, she remarks that millennials are leaving the "evangelical" church and joining the more liturgical and high-church traditions like "Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc."  So millennials aren't leaving "the church," at least not the Church as the body of Christ.  They are simply leaving one expression of that church and moving to others.

However, the main problem is that Evans apparently doesn't recognize that the reason evangelical pastors don't "get it" when she talks to them is because she is fundamentally asking them to stop being evangelical, or at least to radically re-define what "evangelical" means.  She ends her post with a list of things that "we want" (full disclosure, I'm about 2 years older than Evans, consider myself more Gen X than millennial, and have left the "evangelical" tradition for the Episcopal Church) without realizing that the things she wants are the very things that evangelicalism has (as she points out unconsciously) spent its time defining itself against.  Evangelical Christianity has the same problem as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: both are movements of religious conservatives that cannot back down from their current, historically held positions without at a minimum a severe identity crisis, and essentially a paradigmatic shift as to how they deal with society, culture, and theology.

On one hand, Evans is right.  It's not about music, coffee, lighting... style, basically.  It's about the substance of the Christianity being taught and lived out in churches.  But to ask an evangelical pastor to moderate his (and it is almost always a he) stance on the LGBT community, science and evolution, and gender roles, to say nothing of completely redeveloping his ecclesiology so the church is something you don't "go to on Sunday" is to ask him to read the Bible differently, with different eyes and different philosophical assumptions.  It is, essentially to ask him to stop being an evangelical and become something else, something different.  Something, unfortunately for those of us trying to effect this change, that we don't have a name for yet.

In the early 2000s, there was a brief uprush of books being published about "the younger evangelicals" or the "post-evangelicals" or "the emergent church."  They were mostly written by older men, confused about the demands of Gen X at the time, demands which, 10 years ago, were basically identical to Evans' in her post.  The fact that 10 years later, people are asking for the same things ought to at least point out that the evangelical church failed to figure this out.  But the approach is almost the same. In these books (and I read a lot of them as part of a research project for my pastor at the time) generally Gen X and the leading edge of the millennials were treated as anomalies, as strange species to be studied, but not people to be taken seriously.  There was a sense that changing language about community and whatnot, but not changing the core of evangelical belief, would mollify these people and bring them back into the fold.  In a couple years, these men promised anxious pastors, these steps would no longer be needed.

The "evangelical" church is not dying, but for those of us who are tired of asking, we need to sit up and recognize that for some reason, we are asking to wear the "evangelical" label with only being tangentially related to what has been defined as "evangelicalism" culturally.  I am aware the definition is contested, but that is precisely the point.  People older than Gen X who want to expand it, make it a "big tent" are fighting not only their own colleagues, but popular culture in general.

I can't call myself "evangelical" anymore.  According to a friend and former colleague of mine, I never really could :)  This might explain why I am comfortable giving up on that tradition and label and looking for something new.  But I suggest to Evans and her cohort that they should take a critical look at what they are asking and ask themselves if they really want the label "evangelical" or if it isn't, in fact, time to find something new. 

Maybe no label at all, so we can stop this in-grouping and out-grouping and indeed live as the body of Christ.

a historical perspective.

for some reason, i've done a fair amount of academic work on gender and sexuality.  and through that study, i've become convinced of a couple things.  the first and main point is that these two abstract concepts are heavily, heavily influenced by the social context a human being finds themself in.  how you conceive of your identity based on gender and sexual attraction and sexual object choice is inseperable from your larger cultural context.  obviously (like my weasel word there? :) these things originate in one's bodily, physical existence, but there is no consistency or universal across human cultures or history.

you're just going to have to take my word for it since this is a blog and not a thesis.

so today, SCOTUS has, in a deeply divided opinion, struck down the major provision of the federal defence of marriage act (DOMA), stating that DOMA's main purpose was to discriminate unconstitutionally and deprive a subset of state-recognized marriages equal protection under the law.

as predicted, this has caused both an uproar and a celebration.

in my opinion, SCOTUS was completely right.  our constitution indeed guarantees people equal protection, and the federal government breaks that guarantee when it treats one set of government-recognized marriages differently from a different set.  and the main point here is government.

here's a quick crash course:  marriage is a wealth-management strategy.  in the earliest human civilizations that we have record of, the purpose of recognizing a marriage is to determine which children legitimately inherit the family's wealth and name, and which children don't.  because having children are necessary to have someone to inherit your property and name, the gods get invoked in the recognition, in prayers for fertility and childbearing.  marriage is all about sex and babies.  it is not a religious institution.  it is a civil one, with religious additions, because until the 18th century or so, no human culture ever recognized a difference between civic life and religious life.

we've inherited (ha) this setup, with the odd wrinkle that in an exception to the establishment clause in the first amendment, religious figures that perform marriage ceremonies are actually deputized to act as agents of the state for the purpose of officially recognizing a marriage.  in countries that have state religions, this is not an odd wrinkle, because in that context, religious officials are always also officials of the state.  in other countries, it's the opposite.  my brother and sister-in-law have 2 wedding dates: the date their union was registered with the Japanese government and the date their religious wedding took place (a few days later). 

therefore, a statement like this is entirely wrong, legally speaking:

“Obviously it’s a loss to say that the federal government has no right to define marriage as it’s always understood,” he said. “It is just legal chicanery. It’s untrue. It’s a bad decision.”

the only thing the federal government should be concerned with is how society and the state governments define marriage.  if we as a culture have changed to recognize two people of the same gender pledging lifelong commitment to each other as marraige, then how marriage is understood has in fact changed.  what was "always understood" is not important.  how people are managing their wealth today is.  and don't forget, the DOMA case was about inheritance and taxes.

our individualistic age has made one's choice of marriage partner about love, since we know love and sex are closely intertwined.  people of the same gender have always loved each other.  in patriarchal cultures where children were necessary for inheritance and keeping the wealth in the family, exclusive same-gender relationships were socially impossible.  today, we're in a vastly different situation.  and love is love.

obstacles.

i need a job.

the problem is, i have no job-searching skills.  the only jobs i've ever gotten have been because i knew people, or it was an artificial environment like my internships.

in fact, the last time i was in this position (newly graduated, looking for employment), my dad got me a job at the company he worked for.

it's not (or at least, i tell myself it's not) that i'm unemployable with no skills.  i have a lot of skills.  i have a ton of things i can do, and i've had a pretty eclectic employment history. i just don't know how to explain that to people.

also, i am sick to death of office assistant jobs.  i don't have the personality to answer phones or sit at a front desk, and i get bored to tears doing data entry.

when i started seminary, i had the confidence that this was my next step, and that God was going to work things out somehow in the end.  but here i am, at the end, with no job, no phd acceptance, in a new city with no network, sending out resume after resume with no response.

now i don't know what to do.

life and death.

update:  i'm glad to say that the doctors in El Salvador have figured out a way around the ridiculous decision of the court and have given the woman a cesarean section to remove the fetus.  it is worth pointing out here that the fetus was developing without a brain or most of a skull, so it was not a viable pregnancy to begin with.

the supreme court had said

"the rights of the mother cannot take precedence over those of the unborn child or vice versa, and that there is an absolute bar to authorising an abortion" under the Salvadoran constitution.

if forcing a woman to continue a non-viable pregnancy that may kill her is not giving the unborn child precedence over the mother, then i have no idea what is.

let's be clear here.  pregnancy kills women.  not all women, and not all the time, but it does.  and somehow, people have decided that the appropriate Christian moral and ethical response is to let 2 people die instead of 1.

i'm not sure i recognize that Christianity.

original post:

ok, so i am going to wade into a fairly controversial topic, but it's been bugging me.

in several countries, abortion is 100% illegal.  these bans are usually supported by religious people, especially Christians and the Roman Catholic Church.

the problem is, in my perhaps not-so-humble opinion, that these bans are actually making things worse.

they are done with the express defense of the life of the fetus.  life must be protected because it is a gift from God goes the logic.  and i do agree with that statement.  life must be protected because it is a gift from God.  and further, all human beings are created in the image of God, which makes all human beings, even fetuses suspected of having severe defects, inherently valuable and worth protecting.  i am a pacifist in the Anabaptist tradition; i do not believe in killing humans even in self defense, and i do not believe there is any such thing as a "just war."  if i buy meat, i try to buy meat from places that treat their animals well and slaughter them with a minimum of suffering.

however, i refuse to identify myself as "pro-life" in the "abortion debate."  this is because so often, the "pro-life" stance devalues the life and image-of-God-bearing body of the woman who is pregnant.  the fetus, potentially viable or not, is given priority over the life and physical and mental health and well-being of the woman in almost every case.

this has been especially brought to my attention with several news stories recently.  in august 2012, a pregnant teen in the Dominican Republic was denied chemotherapy because it might kill her fetus.  she died and so did the baby.

in Ireland, a woman was denied medical treatment due to internal bleeding while she was in the process of miscarrying because the fetus was technically still alive.  she died and so did the baby.

now in El Salvador, a woman has been denied the ability to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy.  i am hoping and praying that this does not end in 2 more deaths.

that is the problem in all these cases.  the fierce determination to protect the life of a fetus has lead to not one, but two deaths.  somehow, the logic of protecting life because it is a gift from God is leading to the logic that it is better that two people die than one.

i don't get this.  it seems to me to be a blindness, a devaluing of all women by saying it's better that their life be ended along with their unborn child's.  why are 2 deaths better than 1?  how is this defensible for a Christian?  i do not understand.

the ending of a child's life is always a tragedy.  i do not deny that.  but the ending of two lives is, it would seem, even more of a tragedy.  i fully support the medical option for terminating a pregnancy when the mother's life is obviously at stake.  also, as the survivor of sexual assault and as someone who lives with depression, i will not restrict this to just physical health in extremis.  in all of these cases, the fetus was going to die anyway.  it does not make it better, it does not protect life any more to doom the mother to death as well.

if Christians really want to be taken seriously in "the abortion debate" and really do care about protecting life, then i believe this is not only the only logical position to take, but also the only spiritually responsible one as well.  women are not lesser humans, and we are not baby factories.  we are bearers of the image of God, valuable and loved, and i cannot see how any Christian can say it is better to take a chance on two lives than end a potential life to definitely protect a life.

milestone.

well, i have graduated.  Master of Divinity degree conferred.

now what?

doubting thomas.

so i just moved and don't have internet regularly except when i'm at school.  and i preached the second sunday after easter again this year.  as with me, this sermon goes all over the place, but people said afterwards they really appreciated it.  so here it is.

every year for the past few years, i have either taught or co-taught a class for "skeptics," people who are honestly interested in christianity, but have questions. very often, one of those questions is, "is it ok if i have questions?" this class always works my own faith pretty hard, but i really value the experience and would not give any of the past few years up. this sermon came out of some of that reflection.

Doubting Thomas

Have you ever had anyone ask you if you have “accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”? If you haven’t, let me say that you are lucky. It seems to happen to me with uncomfortable regularity. I guess I just don’t look like someone who has. Once, I just had someone mutter, “There’s hope in Jesus” as they walked past me.

Every time this happens, I think to myself, is that what Christianity is? Accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior? Getting some kind of nebulous hope? Going to heaven when we die? This sounds so different from our gospel reading today, doesn’t it? “But these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name.”

Man! Someone call the Bible translation committees! John got it so wrong! We’re not supposed to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. We’re supposed to believe that he is our personal Savior, right? And “life in his name”? Where’s heaven? Where’s what happens after I die? That’s what Christianity is all about. Heaven or hell. Right? ...Right?

My point here is not to belittle street evangelists. They are obviously sincere enough about their faith in Jesus to go up to complete strangers and try to share that faith. They believe what they’re doing is the right thing, and I won’t say that street evangelism has never had any effect. God uses us all in different ways, and God can use anything to build the kingdom of heaven.

But what I am saying is that the “don’t you want to go to heaven when you die” gospel that the street evangelists share with people is only part of the gospel. It’s a compressed, simplified, and to some extent, a reduced gospel.

What does John’s gospel say today? Notice that there is no mention of heaven in the statement where the writer says why he’s written this book. John says only, “that through believing, you may have life in his name.” Heaven isn’t mentioned anywhere. And this statement comes right after the story of “doubting Thomas.” And before that story is the story of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance in John to the disciples where he says to them, “receive the Holy Spirit.” And then he gives them some instructions that seem strangely this-worldly, doesn’t he? Again, nothing about heaven or what’s going to happen after you die.

We are now in this period between Easter and Ascension Day, between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven. In studying this text, I kind of noticed something for the first time: Jesus didn’t go to heaven after he died! He came back to the world for a while. He taught his disciples more, he ate with them, he had a body they could touch. And after he did go to heaven, he left them with a promise that he would come back to this world. So there’s something more to this than going to heaven when you die.

On the other hand, it’s easy to go the other way from the street evangelist and make the gospel all about this world. Jesus’ teaching certainly concentrates on how we should live for God in this world, in the here and now. But again, the gospel of John does not quite fit that either. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says. There is a spiritual reality that also cannot be lost from believing in Jesus. And that spiritual reality contains a word we don’t like very much: sin. Now the church has disagreed over Jesus’ saying here for centuries, and to be honest it baffles me as well, because Jesus also says that only God can judge sin. But at least it must mean that there is a spiritual reality that we engage as Christians as well as a physical one rooted in this world. To lose either side is to shrink Jesus. It may be easier to get people to sign on to a shrunken Jesus, but then, who are they believing in?

And what does it mean to believe? I recently read an article that talked about Protestant problems with doubt. As you might know, one of the key pushes during the Protestant Reformation was to ground salvation in “faith alone.” “Sola fide” as it’s often quoted in Latin. There are a few of these grounding elements of the Reformation; some people call them the “solas.” But since the reformers put such an emphasis on faith, on belief, doubt became an enemy. We all know what a “doubting Thomas” is, right? And we all know that it’s not a compliment.

After the Reformation, the Enlightenment made certainty its holy grail. If you could just be certain about something, you had a place to stand. If you could just be certain about your faith, you are saved. It’s simple. It’s easy.

And it’s totally unrealistic.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That sure makes it seem like doubt can’t be part of your life if you follow Jesus, doesn’t it? And yet what often gets missed in this story is Thomas’ shocking answer: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas may have doubted, but he came to such an amazing declaration of faith.

Many scholars see an echo of the Shema in Thomas’ answer. The Shema is the basic prayer of Judaism. It is one of the first things an observant Jew will say in the morning after waking up, and one of the last things said at night before going to bed. It is called the “Shema” because that is the first word of the prayer in Hebrew. We know it in English as “Hear O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one.” In Hebrew, LORD stands in for the proper name of God, and the Greek Jewish writings carry that tradition over. When Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” he is making an extreme declaration of faith for any Jew.

And tradition tells us that Thomas went to India to spread belief in Jesus there. There are still churches in India today that trace their heritage back to Thomas. And of course, Thomas’ tradition was strong enough in the first two centuries of Christianity that we have a collection of Jesus’ sayings named after him: the gospel of Thomas. Regardless of its later reception by the church, you do not get a gospel named after you if you are considered the paramount example of someone who failed in your Christian journey.

If doubt is the enemy of faith, we would have to not only disqualify Thomas, but a huge number of the Psalms as well. Many, many Psalms express doubt about God and God’s purposes. They cry from the darkness of despair and depression. Just last week on Good Friday, we heard Jesus cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If that is not doubt, I don’t know what is. If even Jesus doubt, and not only Jesus, but the psalm-writer before him, how can we say doubt is the enemy of faith?

Notice Jesus’ response to Thomas: “Stop doubting and believe.” Doubt is normal. A faith that never doubts, that never wrestles with questions like the possibility or impossibility of resurrection is not much of a belief. But a faith that never stops doubting is not much of a belief either. Chronic, constant doubt kills our belief. On one side, we have to lose our affection for certainty and realize that we will never have it. Faith, belief, trust - these are not certainty. They are instead the voice that says, “My LORD and my God!” even in the dark times. But on the other hand, if we can never say that either because we are too concerned with getting something right, with missing something, with something being impossible, we do not have faith either.

Remember where Jesus appears: in the middle of the disciples. They are all in a group, relying on each other to get them through this dark time. And it is the group that bears witness to Thomas. One of the promises of Jesus is that he formed a community to carry on his work and his teaching. Everyone receives the Holy Spirit. In the dark, in the doubting times, we never have to go it alone. Thomas might doubt, but he sticks with his fellow disciples anyway. When our own faith is falling to pieces, the church picks us up and carries us until we can see Jesus again in our lives.

Jesus isn’t my personal savior. He is all our savior! And he is not just “my Lord” but all our Lord. And sometimes we might get something wrong, but there is always someone else to offer another viewpoint. Jesus is not just spiritual and not just of this world. We question and we doubt, but we gather with Christians every week or month or year to fall on our knees and say, “my LORD and my God!”

Amen.

radical hospitality.

i know i just preached, but since i didn't preach at all january and february, i guess i have some making up to do :) what actually happened was the rector was coordinating a diocesan retreat yesterday and they had a drama at the later, more popular service, so i volunteered to write a sermon for the small early service, which is where i've been preaching about once a month for the past year.

and the passage was John 12:1-8 which is one of my favourite gospel passages out of all of them.

Radical Hospitality

Did everyone see the media frenzy back in the fall about the whole “Jesus’ wife” thing? A scholar at Harvard discovered an ancient papyrus fragment from Egypt that had the words “Jesus said, ‘my wife...’” written on it. The whole thing was hard to miss... It was on CNN, ABC, NBC, all the news stations. People were speculating and commenting. Even the Vatican came out with a strong statement accusing it of being a modern forgery.

The whole thing got me thinking, you know, why is this such a frenzy? Why are the mass media, companies with budgets in the millions of dollars, spending so much time and energy on a little fragment of papyrus, a couple inches square, and an obscure researcher at Harvard working in the incredibly obscure field known as “papyrology”? You know, the down-to-brass-tacks practical question of what makes them think they’re going to get their money back from this story?

Let’s face it: Christianity is big news. And not only things that appear to question orthodox Christian belief like this papyrus. The media frenzy and circus around the election of the new Pope is pretty much identical. Pope Francis gave an audience just yesterday to 6900 reporters and media staff. Almost seven thousand men and women came to hear the Pope, not to receive spiritual guidance or wisdom, but because it’s their job, and they are getting paid to send news of this man all over the world.

But what struck me as almost funny about the coverage of that little papyrus was the superficiality of it. As I said, papyrology is a pretty obscure field, and you really can’t expect journalists to dig into the nuances and details of this field that they report on maybe once or twice in five years. But it wasn’t only papyrology that got a superficial coverage, it was Christianity itself. No one, at least that I saw, bothered to talk about early Coptic Christianity in Egypt, the community that probably created the papyrus. Is it because this is also an obscure branch of Christianity, or is it because this community is currently being threatened by the new Islamist government in Egypt, and contemporary politics are too much of a hot potato to be in a story about Jesus and his wife?

And no one, again, at least that I saw, ever commented about one of the names for the church in the Bible itself. Do you know what the church is called in the New Testament? Yeah, it’s called Christ’s bride. The author of Ephesians compares the relationship of a husband and wife with Jesus and the church. In fact, he gets so enraptured with his metaphor that he actually has to stop halfway through this exalted rhetoric to comment “oh wait, but I am talking about Christ and the church.” At the end of the visions in the book of Revelation, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’” They invite everyone to “take the water of life as a gift.” This image seems to parallel the visions in Isaiah of Israel welcoming the nations to Jerusalem to worship the one God of Israel, with the church as the inviting bride.

Is it so surprising, then, that we might find an ancient writing from a tradition that scholars know was heavily mystical, where Jesus refers to his wife? A professor last semester, who has his Ph.D. in papyrology suggested just that: that this fragment might not be written about a human wife for Jesus, but it might have been written to encourage the church as the bride of Christ. Especially considering that the rest of the sentence has been torn off the papyrus fragment, we really have no idea. Even the Harvard researcher who made the discovery was cautious, commenting that this proves nothing one way or the other about the historical, human Jesus. Her voice did tend to be downed out, however, by the excitement!

But the other thing that struck me in the coverage is that whenever anyone goes searching the gospels fro a wife for Jesus, the inevitably latch on to Mary Magdalene. And it makes me wonder, why not this Mary in our gospel passage today? She is not Mary Magdalene, but Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Imagine the scene. There is a banquet. People are reclining on couches. They are probably all getting ready for the Passover which will start in a few days. Maybe they are talking about the trip to Jerusalem, tensions with the Roman military occupiers, gossiping about the priests in Jerusalem. Maybe Martha is encouraging them to eat up all the bread, because you cannot have anything with yeast in the house during Passover. Lazarus and his family may have been giving the banquet to thank Jesus for raising him from the dead. And in the middle of the dinner, Mary, the sister of the host, in fact probably one of the hosts herself, comes in, breaks a stone jar of perfume over Jesus’ feet, and then unveils her hair and wipes his feet with it.

Do you know how intimate an act that is? She is touching, caressing him. She has unveiled her hair in the presence of all the guests, especially all the unrelated men in her house, and she is wiping the feet of her rabbi with it. A woman’s hair in the Middle East is a symbol of her sexuality. It is no coincidence that, even at its most minimal, the Islamic hijab covers a woman’s hair, or that observant orthodox Jewish women cover their hair so that after they are married, no man sees their hair but their husband.

And what is the objection to her act? It is not, as it is in a slightly different version in Luke, that the woman is sexually impure. There is no comment on her sexuality at all. And it is not the objection about status which Peter gives in the very next chapter when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. Much has been made in commentaries about Jesus washing feet that it was a slave’s job. But that is not the objection here. Instead what Judas objects to is the financial impropriety of her act. Not even Mary’s brother comments at the way she is opening herself and her family up for accusations of dishonor. No, all anyone seems to care about is the waste of money.

The financial equivalent is actually quite hard to work out in this case. A denarius was a silver coin of the Roman Empire, and it was what a daily laborer would get paid. These are like the people who are hired to work in the vineyards, in Jesus’ parables. There was no middle class as we think of it in the Roman Empire, so to call something like this “minimum wage” would be misleading. It would be enough to keep a family on. So something more like a construction contractor’s yearly income, maybe. According to the U.S. government, that would be something around $35,000. Mary pours $35,000 worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet.

So when I think about the intimacy and the extravagance of this event, not just the financial extravagance but also the personal risk involved, do I think this Mary was Jesus’ wife?

No, not really. For one, this is the only hint of any kind of relationship between these two. For another, we don’t know if her brother and sister berated her in private afterwards. For a third reason, I think this extravagance can be explained by the fact that just in the previous chapter, Jesus raised her brother from the dead. This does not seem an unrealistic response of gratitude to me. Her family is already giving a dinner for Jesus and all his disciples. We can surmise both from the apparent size of the party to the fact that the family owned a jar of perfume worth that much money that they were very wealthy. It is even possible that the nard had been meant for Lazarus, and when Jesus raised him from the dead, the siblings decided to anoint Jesus with it out of gratitude. I think, though, that we can rule out that they expected Mary to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. That was her own offering, her own sacrifice of her dignity and honor for Jesus’ sake.

And what is Jesus’ response? Does he protect her sexual honor? No again. He simply accepts her sacrifice and protects her from criticism of her financial decision. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’”

Many scholars see an echo of Deuteronomy 15:11 in Jesus’ reply here, so like a good seminary student, like a good preacher, I went and looked it up. And indeed, the two comments are remarkably similar. But what was even more interesting was the context of Deuteronomy 15. Deuteronomy 15:11 comments that there will always be poor in the land, but the chapter is not about the poor, but it is about the Sabbath year. Every seventh year, ancient Israel was supposed to cancel everyone’s debts. Deuteronomy chapter 15 is mostly concerned with laying down the procedure for loans to be cancelled from repayment. 15:11 comes at the end of an instruction not to take the proximity of the Sabbath year into account when making a loan. “Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, 'The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,' and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing.”

God turns our economic practices on their heads. The Israelites are instructed to give loans, not only without consideration of interest income, but even without consideration of ever being paid back! Mary’s personal risk in this story takes it even further. Not only does she give extravagantly financially, but she also gives extravagantly of her own dignity, personal status, and sexual reputation.

Every week, when the gospel passage is read here, we affirm that it is the gospel of the Lord. And we praise Christ for giving us his gospel. This is a gospel that calls us to an uncomfortable, a radically uncomfortable re-ordering of the way things work. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to extravagant hospitality and extravagant personal and financial risk without any consideration of what we might “get back,” or even, in some cases, what consequences we might suffer. Mary could not know that Jesus would defend her, although she surely knew that someone would object to her actions. And she did it anyway.

May our own risks and gifts be made, not with the risk-reward, “how am I going to make my money back” calculations, but with obedience to the gospel and such love of our rabbi and our Lord.

Amen.

Here I am.

yeah, i haven't blogged in a while.  mostly because i haven't preached in a while.  life has been crazy and hectic and also i was sick and today was the first preaching date that made sense in my calendar.

this sermon on Exodus 3 is based on one i preached for Encounter back in July 2011.  i like this version better.  i always felt fake shoehorning in down-to-earth, practical advice into my sermons.  and partly i had to do that to make the sermon at least 30 minutes, which was what they expected.  i much prefer preaching shorter, 1-point teaching sermons.  this one was about 15 minutes instead of the original 30-plus.  it also avoids the transcendent/immanent theophany bit that i tried to include in the original version and then gutted because someone who read it before i preached it didn't like it.

what i did also add to this one instead of a reference to John 8 is some of the language of this morning's gospel passage from Luke 13.

Here I am

Do you ever feel like Moses in this passage?. When he appears here in Exodus 3, he has murdered a man and run away from being an Egyptian prince, but you know, here he’s doing pretty well for himself. He has a wife, a kid, a job, even a rich father-in-law... maybe it’s not as exciting or luxurious as it used to be in Egypt’s royal court, but hey, no one’s trying to kill him.

He’s a shepherd for his father-in-law. And then... God shows up.

It’s funny, we usually think that when things are going pretty well, that’s evidence that God has shown up in our lives. But sometimes in the bible, it’s the opposite. Things are going well and then God shows up and your life takes a left turn.

When I first learned about seminary, I thought, “I’m a Classics major. I don’t need another useless degree!” But here I am. In the past month, my husband Chris got offered a job in Manhattan. Talk about life taking a left turn! We’re now getting ready to move again, in the middle of the semester as I finish out at Princeton and at All Saints’. The next few months are going to be crazy and busy and full of work, but faith says God is involved in this somehow.

And our story is not nearly as dramatic as Moses’. In this case, Moses is out with his sheep, and “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, 'I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.'”

So, something out of the ordinary is happening. The bush was on fire, but it did not burn up. Bushes usually burn up. I remember once driving through California, the hillsides were black with the remains of bushes and trees that had been completely consumed by wildfire. So Moses, quite logically, goes over to check this out.

And then God calls to Moses: When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

I don’t know about you, but if a burning bush called my name, I’m not sure “Here I am” would be my response.

But Moses’ response - “Here I am” - is a very important one in the Bible. It’s used several times throughout the whole Bible. In Hebrew, it’s just one word. The rabbis traditionally interpret this word not just to mean, “Here I am,” but, “Here I am, ready to do whatever you command me.”

Abraham says it in Genesis 22, and God tells him to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Samuel answers with the word in 1 Samuel 3, when god is calling him to be his prophet.

Isaiah says it in Isaiah 6, when God asks, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

In Acts 9, God calls a Christian named Ananias in a vision and he answers with the Greek version of this same word. And then God tells him to go meet a young Pharisee who has been killing Christians, but who had a mystical experience on the road to Damascus and is struck blind. Ananias’ job will be to restore this man’s sight.

And I love Ananias’ response. Ananias’ response to God’s command is, well, he’s not so sure. He kind of says, “God, are you sure you know what you’re doing?” ‘“Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name."“

In the gospel of Luke, Mary asks her questions to the angel first, but she gives the same answer as well. “Here I am, the servant of the Lord.”

You see, this is kind of the pattern. Life is going along, and the -rrrt! God calls your name. Abraham finally has his promised son. Samuel has a pretty good thing going serving in the temple. So does Isaiah, he’s an honored priest. Ananias is living comfortably far away from the persecution going on in Jerusalem. Mary is all ready to get married. And God shows up in all these lives and says, I’m going to pull you out of your comfort zone.

Even Moses is afraid isn’t so sure God has the right person.

And very often the people who have just responded to God in faith take this opportunity to push back, to ask questions, to engage in real dialogue with God.

After telling Moses who he is, God gives him this divine plan. He says, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and now I am going to keep my promises to them. Their descendants are already a nation; now I am going to give them the land I promised.” And then he says to Moses, “So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

And what does Moses say? Does he say, “Wow, I’m so honored”? No.

Does he say, “I’m ready to serve wherever you need me”? No.

First, he is afraid and he hides his face. When God finally tells Moses what he is to do, Moses says, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

Ananias comes by his doubts of God honestly. Even Moses wasn’t sure God was getting it right. But, spoiler alert! All these people end up doing what God asked them to do. Moses and Ananias argue about it for a while, and it takes three times before Samuel’s teacher Eli finally figures out what’s going on, God wins.

And I take great comfort in God’s reply to Moses. When Moses asks, “who am I?” God doesn’t say, “You’re Moses! You got saved from the massacre of infant boys! You were raised as an Egyptian prince!” No, God says, “I will be with you.”

God will be with me. God will be with us. God did not leave Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Mary, Ananias, or any other person he’s ever called. And, did you know, we’re all called?

We are call by a God who appears as a burning bush in the middle of the desert.

We are called by a God who will always be with us.

We are called by a God who became a human like us, who walked and taught, ate and died, like we do.

But Moses, Abraham, Ananias, Mary, you and me … we argue with him, we question him, and we’ve run away from him. God looks on the Israelites as they groan in slavery. He is concerned. He remembers his promise to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. He wants to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. He talks with Moses and promises to be with him.

His name is an entry point into knowing him. If God wanted to stay majestic and all-powerful and incomprehensible, he would not have given a name at all.

But this God wants to be known!

When God first introduces himself, even before God’s name is revealed, God is simply “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” And Moses is afraid and hides his face. What is Moses afraid of?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of the United Kingdom says that his teacher told him what Moses was afraid of was seeing the suffering of the innocent from God’s perspective, and that Moses was rewarded for it. He writes, “If he could ‘look at the face of God,’ if he could understand history from the perspective of heaven, he would have to make his peace with the suffering of human beings… He would understand the ultimate justice of history. That is what Moses refused to do, because the price of such knowledge was simply too high… He preferred to fight injustice as he saw it, than to accept it by seeing its role in the script of eternity…” That refusal, which Rabbi Sacks describes as, “born not out of a lack of faith but precisely the opposite, the conviction that God wants us to be in active in the pursuit of justice” that drives everyone who answers God’s call with, “Here I am.”

When God shows up in our lives and calls us, God calls us to live in a new way for God’s creation. Moses is taken out of his comfortable life and sent back to his own people, his former home, to fight for freedom and liberation, to fight against the oppressor and for the oppressed.

It’s so easy to think that wealth and smooth sailing in life are signs of God’s divine favor and hard times are signs of God’s punishment. But Scripture is not sure that is true. Are those who suffer oppression and injustice, violence and death, worse sinners than everyone else?

God’s call to us contains a warning: we only have a little time. God enters a dialogue with us; we question and push back and bargain, but by our very human nature, we only have a little time. Lent may be when the days are getting longer, but it begins with Ash Wednesday, which reminds us that “you will all perish just as they did.”

When God calls us to fight injustice, to struggle with and for the oppressed, to carry his message of liberation to the world, we have a choice. We can answer, “Here I am,” or we can run away. “Here I am” does not mean unquestioning, silent, unthinking obedience. Abraham and Isaiah answered with that, but Moses, and Mary, and Ananias did not. And they stand for us as examples in the faith. Even Jesus, praying in the garden before his own death, struggles with God. Without Jesus’ death, there would be no resurrection, the resurrection that began to bring God’s new creation, that inspires and drives and fertilizes our lives to bear fruit for God.

God calls us to go out into the world, outside of our comfort zones, to leave behind the things we thought were signs of his blessing, and to change the world, to get rid of injustice, racism, sexism, violence, and all kinds of discrimination and oppression.

And God will be with us.

Amen.



Quote taken from: Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (New Milford, CT: Maggid Books, 2010), 38-40.

before they're gone...

very sadly, my former church was forced this year by the load of an unpayable mortgage to merge with another one.  and the new church doesn't have much use for women in a teaching ministry.

from 2005 to 2011, my husband and i were part of the emergent community that existed there.  they were our friends, our family, our congregation.  and eventually, as i learned and matured in seminary, i was given the wonderful priviledge of being one of their preachers.

i discovered a few days ago that some of the last sermons i preached there are still available on the website. this website will go away sometime this month, probably, in favour of the one from the new church, so this will only be relevant for a few more weeks.

the church i am currently attending does not have recording capabilities, and of course this blog is mostly my sermon manuscripts, but if any readers here would like to actually hear me preach, go ahead and click the link.

the sermons are much longer than the ones i have posted here; that community was used to 30-45 minute sermons.  i find i much prefer writing and preaching shorter sermons, but most of these hit the 30 minute mark. 

i'm not actually very proud of these.  they have significant flaws, and they represent a growing stage for me as a preacher and, really, pastor.  i disagree with some of the theology i preached in these, but they reflect the dominant theology of the community and the founding pastor (who always reviewed my sermons with me after i preached them).  in my humble opinion, the earliest one available there, from April 14, is the best, although today if i preached it, it would be less supersessionist.  the latest one, from September 4, is the same as this post.

with the change to a new year, sometimes it's good to look back and see where we've been.  this is where i've been.  it's an unalterable part of my story.