brethren priestess online

Not plastic crud from Wal-mart made in sweatshops and sold to run small businesses out of town.  No siree.

It saddens me every year to see how corrupted this lovely season of holidays has become. The generosity of the Magi on Epiphany has been perverted into materialism and shopping mall stampedes. The memory of harried immigrant parents traveling across the desert has been exploited to support global economic disparities that exacerbate international migration and miserable labor conditions. The humble beginnings of our Jesus Christ’s birth in Bethlehem have become submerged in a pre-packaged Christmas of fake snow and sucrose.  I really do wish we could put our Christ back in Christmas, and pull all the credit cards, all the consumerism, all the conformity, all the crap! out of my favorite holiday.

As you may have guessed, I just saw the new movie What Would Jesus Buy? by Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame) about Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping as they made their pre-Christmas national tour to save people from the Shopocalypse.  The movie is good, and you should go see it. It compassionately portrays real, creative, edgy, radical direct activism, showing that the people involved are real people, struggling with the same societal pressures to consume as the rest of US, but while still maintaining their ethics.  And even without coming out as Christian, it reminds us what Christmas - and all of Jesus Christ’s radical, liberatory message - is really about.

During your summer reading, did you start to wonder why Harry was seeming so Christ-like? Or what was up with all those Biblical inscriptions? Or all that talk about souls and overcoming death? Author J.K. Rowling explains.

And, by the way, Dumbledore is gay. Rowling outed him in a speech at Carnegie Hall. Apparently, he was in love with his arch rival Grindelwald the whole time.

Who knew that the story would continue, even after the books were all written? Rowling seems to have cleverly developed a solid epic, woven in religious themes Christians can resonate with, and then ramped up the heat by outing one of the story’s most beloved characters. She pulls you in, then says, ‘Oh, yeah. By the way, that guy you love so much? He’s one of those people you think you have to hate.’ It gets homophobic folks to identify with the character, and then exposes how easily he could be one of the people homophobic folks define themselves in opposition to.

Hooray for gay Christian magicians! And their fans!

2 Timothy 1

The sermon this morning at the First Congregational Church of San Rafael explored the opening verses of the Second Letter to Timothy. The greetings in these epistles are always interesting, but this one is especially so, because of the way the pseudonymous writer (i.e. NOT Paul) bases his claim that Timothy stay faithful as he commences his new leadership project. He reminds Timothy who he is by reminding him of the long line of faithful followers of the way who are his genetic lineage. Most remarkably (to me, always stunned by feminism in the Epistles), the two ancestors he names are Timothy’s mother Lois and his grandmother Eunice. These two women are Timothy’s faithful forebears.

The preacher, my seminary friend Jeanette, told of how her own mother had gifted her with an inheritance of faith, even though her means were not explicitly devout. In sturdy, no-nonsense Midwest fashion, her family went to church and Bible study, but didn’t talk about it at home. Yet, they still lived out their faith, just without the Christian lingo attached to it. She would quilt and crochet blankets, for her children, for her grandchildren, and for women at the local domestic violence shelters. (If I wanted to be painfully cheesy, I would point out here that in doing so, she warmed both bodies and hearts.)

At the end of her sermon, the preacher offered time for congregants to share ways they had inherited their faith. I shared how much my family patterns resonated with the description of the Midwestern values she had described.

My grandfather, the astronomy, chemistry, and geology professor at the local Brethren college, always served as expert guide on our family hikes in the North Woods. From the time we could walk, he would make our hikes nature lessons. He would bend down on one knee to point out the slimy mushrooms on logs, or he would pick up branches to show us how to identify the trees around us. The leaves of the forest showed us curious children the beautiful complexity of God’s creation as well as the pages of the Bible ever did.

Until seminary, I didn’t recognize the lessons in my family’s interactions for what they were: the living out of a Christian faith so deep it got beyond the business of talking about it.

Growing up, I thought it was rude that my mother didn’t say “Bless you” when someone sneezed. But then I realized that instead of just saying “Bless you,” she would get up and get the person a handkerchief. She responded to the bodily need represented in the sneeze, not with trite words but with what those words should represent: a commitment to the person’s health. She revealed an inclination too few Christians exhibit: not to recite the ‘perfect’ lines of doctrine and dogma, but (dare I say it?) to feed thousands, to heal ailing beggars, to raise children from the dead.

Amen for the faith of our families!

by me and my PSR buddies

• Chances are you’ll find someone who shares similar values and/or worldviews with you—especially fellow church geeks.
• He knows a lot. In the Biblical sense.
• She’ll have a friend who can do your wedding for free.
• He probably won’t make enough money to raise your tax bracket.
• The laying on of hands takes on a whole new meaning.
• After all that theological pondering, she can make a stronger argument for atheism than anyone else.
• He’s so glad to get off campus that he’s a cheap date.
• Special moments will be enhanced by recitations from the Song of Songs. “As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” (Song of Songs 2:3)
• You just might be the partner of the next famous televangelist.
• You get a free ticket to heaven.
• You get a free ticket to D’Autremont.
• She can really greet people with the Holy Kiss. (Romans 16:16)
• Confessing sins of the flesh takes on new appeal.
• As Paul writes, “it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (I Corinthians 7:9b).
• You just might be enticed into seminary studies yourself.

If the harassment of girls’ schools and barbershops is not enough to make you detest Afghanistan’s version of militant conservative Islam, the latest kidnapping of Korean Christian aid workers ought to make you sad, irate, both. US press never makes a big deal out of kidnappings when they don’t involve US or UK lives, but some stories have reached even us. I broke into tears reading the pleas of the father of two hostages. This is so wrong.

My message to terrorists of every kind: Your cause loses every ounce of my sympathy when you target nonviolent aid workers. You are no different than every other imperial power that reverts to the colonial method of using violence in order to secure your fleeting earthly power. Life is God’s to define, not yours, and you idolize yourself and your own human power to make the ultimate ethical choice when you take human life. The fact that you cannot differentiate between aid workers and soldiers or mercenaries bearing arms proves the pathetic incapacity of your human power to substitute for God’s imminent wisdom, wisdom that I know speaks to your heart as much as all of ours. Why can you not listen?

I am so mad. And so sad. Please stop this violence.

So, does the Pope just want to have no friends at all? Who will want to play with him in the sandbox? Last fall he angered Muslims by praising homilicidal Pope Urban (who called for the first Crusades). Last week he pissed off Jews by reinstating the Tridentine Mass without removing the Good Friday prayers for conversion of the Jews. And now he’s calling non-Roman-Catholic Christians not real Christians. (Thanks a lot!)  What’s next? A statement denouncing atheists?

Also of interest, the AP article reports,

Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.

(Emphasis added.) So, basically, the Holy Father doesn’t like traditions unless they’re conservative? Right. This guy’s giving my dad reasons for his pantheist phase.

I’m sending my prayers out to all my great Catholic friends across the world, that their faithful witness to the loving, universal, universe-loving spirit of Catholicism might seep back into even the Holy See.

Hi Dad;

Yes, I think I do agree with this, too.

I saw Hitchens go at it with another guy, Christopher Hedges, in Berkeley a few weeks ago. Very interesting - I hope we get to talk about it. Dawkins is also interesting, and while I cannot disagree with either of their arguments totally because their examples of violent religion are exactly what motivate me to get involved in religion, I think they fail semantically when they refuse to differentiate between fundamentalist religions and liberal, mystical, or the many other religious orientations. Conflating the worst religious views with the totality of what is possible religiously is just weak debating.

I like Fish’s point that the atheist arguments reveal more about humans (men) than God. That’s key. Atheism too often posits humans/human reason as a god in themselves, which is fine in a closed system, but it’s pretty weak when trying to live in a world composed of more than just humans. Just because something is made by humans doesn’t mean it’s useless - so long as it’s used with awareness of its limitations.

Is religion human-made? Yes. And therein lies its greatness. The recognition that religion is manmade (human-made, but the patriarchal biases of religions need to be recognized, too) is not the end of religion, but the beginning of true religion. Too many fundamentalists fail to get there, and too many atheists stop there. Only once we recognize our humility, our limits, and the limits of our own created systems, can we stand in awe of the mystery that is God that is ultimate meaning in life.

My humble thoughts for the day.

Tom writes:

This seems interesting. I tend to agree.

June 24, 2007, 7:17 pm

Stanley Fish in the NY Times: Is Religion Man-Made?

Sure it is. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens think that this fact about religion is enough to invalidate its claims.

“[R]eligion and the churches,” declares Hitchens “are manufactured, and this salient fact is too obvious to ignore.” True to his faith, Dawkins finds that the manufacturing and growth of religion is best described in evolutionary terms: “[R]eligions, like languages, evolve with sufficient randomness, from beginnings that are sufficiently arbitrary, to generate the bewildering – and sometimes dangerous – richness of diversity.” Harris finds a historical origin for religion and religious traditions, and it is not flattering: “The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.”

And, they continue, it wasn’t even the work of sand-strewn men who labored in the same place at the same time. Rather, it was pieced together from fragments and contradictory sources and then had claimed for it a spurious unity: “Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world” (Dawkins).

Hitchens adds that “the sciences of textual criticism, archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man-made.” And yet, wonders Harris, “nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity.”

So there’s the triple-pronged case. Religions are humanly constructed traditions and at their center are corrupted texts that were cobbled together by provincial, ignorant men who knew less about the world than any high-school teenager alive today. Sounds devastating, but when you get right down to it, all it amounts to is the assertion that God didn’t write the books or establish the terms of worship, men did, and that the results are (to put it charitably) less than perfect.

But that is exactly what you would expect. It is God (if there is one) who is perfect and infinite; men are finite and confined within historical perspectives. And any effort to apprehend him – including the efforts of the compilers of the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran – will necessarily fall short of a transparency that will be achieved (if it is achieved) only at a future moment of beatific vision. Now – any now, whether it be 2007 or 6,000 years ago – we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians, 13:12); one day, it is hoped, we shall see face to face.

In short, it is the unfathomable and unbridgeable distance between deity and creature that assures the failure of the latter to comprehend or prove (in the sense of validating) the former.

O.L. (in a comment on June 11), identifies the “religion is man-made claim” as the “strongest foundation of atheism” because “it undermines the divinity of god.” No, it undermines the divinity of man, which is, after all, the entire point of religion: man is not divine, but mortal (capable of death), and he is dependent upon a creator who by definition cannot be contained within human categories of perception and description. “How unsearchable are his Judgments and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor” (Romans, 11:33-34). It is no wonder, then, that the attempts to contain him – in scriptures, in ceremonies, in prayer – are flawed, incomplete and forever inadequate. Rather than telling against divinity, the radical imperfection, even corruption, of religious texts and traditions can be read as a proof of divinity, or at least of the extent to which divinity exceeds human measure.

If divinity, by definition, exceeds human measure, the demand that the existence of God be proven makes no sense because the machinery of proof, whatever it was, could not extend itself far enough to apprehend him.

Proving the existence of God would be possible only if God were an item in his own field; that is, if he were the kind of object that could be brought into view by a very large telescope or an incredibly powerful microscope. God, however – again if there is a God – is not in the world; the world is in him; and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, from which he could be spied. As that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned by anything or anyone because there is no possibility of achieving the requisite distance from his presence that discerning him would require.

The criticism made by atheists that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a God whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn’t be a God; he would just be another object in the field of human vision.

This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of religion; for if I were to claim that I would be making the atheists’ mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the atheists’ arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it.

At various points Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens all testify to their admiration for Shakespeare, who, they seem to think, is more godly than God. They would do well to remember one of the bard’s most famous lines, uttered by Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

May Day 2007 -

Welcome to the May Day chapel service sponsored by the Council of the Community Association of our seminary. Today, we are hosting this chapel service to thank the staff and faculty who make this institution what it is. We want to honor their work here, as a spiritual contribution to our world.

Today is May Day, a day that has traditionally been celebrated by pagans as Beltane, the beginning of spring. Since the 19th century, however, May Day has also been the international Labor Day. In May 1886, workers organizing in Chicago were faced with police violence, in what came to be known as the Haymarket Riot. The holiday now celebrates the social and economic achievements of the labor movement and all the working classes.

On this May Day, with marches around the country, and recalling the mobilizations last year, we celebrate the current labor movement that is drawing attention to the ethics of our economic system, and its impact on political, social, and religious life, in the experience of immigration. We offer this chapel service to honor work as an act of solidarity with all those marching and striking and educating today in support of rights for immigrants, and we carry the lessons of this modern May Day mobilizing into our service today.

We have learned that honoring labor is not just a question of interpersonal relations, or even relationships within an institution, but that it is a call to reanalyze the very fabric of our societies: to reconsider political-economic policy globally that fosters disparities of resources among G*d’s children, and to reconsider our relationship to work itself.

As Christians, we know that we are much more than the jobs we do, but we also know that one of the primary ways we embody our spiritual and physical interconnections is through the ways we serve one another. The labor movements of past and present teach us that the work we do is central to who we are in relation to our world, and so every worker, all work, deserves respect and dignity. All the work we do can be ‘labors of love,’ and the most respectful way to honor that labor is through just compensation: a living wage, fair benefits, and the assurance that our work is appreciated by all those we serve. We as Christian leaders honor the call in Ephesians 5:21 to serve one another, out of reverence for the Christ in each of us; we honor this call by recognizing the interdependent systems of mutual service we perform for our daily bread, by feeling G*d’s spirit empowering all the work we do, for our livings. We as Christians have the awesome ability and responsibility to help infuse the labor movement with an understanding of the spirituality of work – to make it not just a labor movement, but a labor of love movement.

Today, in this service, we seek to honor a specific part of this ‘labor of love’ movement: the people who work in the institution where we find our educational home. We wish to thank all who create and sustain the physical spaces here, all who nourish our bodies and minds, all who facilitate this community into being the Body of Christ gathered here in this place, in this time. We want to add our blessing to G*d’s, for the work you all do for the world and for us.