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.

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.

The York Center Green Fair I spoke at last weekend made it into local news, the Lombard Spectator, in a cute little story about my Pastor Christy Waltersdorff. Isn’t she adorable!

 “This congregation is very involved in a lot of environmental issues,” she said. “If we believe God created the world and gave us stewardship of it, I can’t imagine why people would not be out taking a stand.”

The Green Fair featured presentations on various environmental topics and also highlighted the church’s commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050, said Loren Habegger, a church member and the person Waltersdorff credits with coming up with the idea of a Green Fair.

That’s really quite an impressive commitment.  Too bad this climate crisis we’re living in will require nothing less.